Dr. Pepine is a native of Pittsburgh, PA and received his B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh and M.D. from (Rutgers New Jersey School of Medicine, Newark, NJ).  After internship, residency and cardiology training and a tour of duty in the Navy he was recruited to the University of Florida in 1974.  Since then he was Chief of Cardiology at the Malcom Randall VA Hospital and then Shands UF and held the AHA Eminent Scholar Chair in Cardiovascular Research.

Dr. Pepine’s fields of research interest are Ischemic Heart Disease/Hypertension/Heart Failure/Cell-based therapy/CVD in Women and he has had continuous peer reviewed funding (DoD, VA, VA Merit, NIH) for over 40 years. He has authored/co-authored more than 850 scientific publications and edited 6 textbooks all in the field of CV Medicine.

Currently, he serves on the Executive Committee of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), the Leadership Committee for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, CDRN, and Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) Regenerative Medicine Task Force.

He is PI of the UF Center for NIH-supported Women’s Ischemic Syndrome Evaluation (WISE) (1996 to present). He is Director of the CV Cell Therapy Program at UF and PI of the NHLBI funded Cardiovascular Cell Therapy (CCTRN) Regional Center at UF (2007 to present), MPI of Brain-Gut Microbiome-Immune Axis in Hypertension Project, and Co-I for several others.