By Christina Crowe
For more than 45 years, Thurman Richardson has worked with the recently departed, serving as a liaison between the doctors and nurses who cared for them in their last moments of life, and their families.
Richardson, Technical Director for the UAB Autopsy Service and the Office of Decedent Affairs, is one of UAB Medicine’s longest serving employees, and some might say has one of the most unique jobs in the health system. He refers to what he does as, “practicing compassionate care.”
A pathology assistant by training, Richardson has served in an administrative role since 1989, and has worked at UAB Pathology with the autopsy service since his days as a student at UAB.
Richardson was an undergrad at Lawson College who needed money to pay for tuition. Some friends who worked in the department as morgue attendants got him a job doing the same. Rather than being deterred by death, Richardson found it fascinating, he says, using an analogy of batteries powering toys.
“Toys run out of batteries,” he says. “I used to look at human beings living 70 or 90 years without a battery and think, ‘how does that work?’ I wanted to know how a human being could keep functioning for so long.”
In February, the Division of Laboratory Medicine, directed by Vishnu Reddy, M.D., Professor, announced the naming of two faculty in the Division of Laboratory Medicine as associate division directors:
José Lima, M.D., Assistant Professor; Director, Clinical Immunology and Therapeutic Apheresis
Sixto Leal, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor; Director, Clinical Microbiology and Fungal Reference Lab
In addition, Liyun Cao, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, has been named Chemistry Section Head,
and Forest Huls, M.D., Assistant Professor, has been named Director, Protein Electrophoresis & Related Services.
Please join us in congratulating these leaders in their new roles in the Division of Laboratory Medicine.
This month, February 2022, in honor of Valentine's Day and in the spirit of celebrating love, we asked teammates in our department for stories of love in their lives. A few responded and were willing to share their personal tales.
Greg and Sue Davis met when Greg, Division Director, Forensic Pathology, was a fourth-year medical student and Sue was a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Vanderbilt University. They had friends in common and kept running into one another for about a year on campus before actually dating.
“We started off as friends who liked the same sorts of movies, so we started seeing those together,” Greg recalls. They dated for about two years before they got married, on November 4, 1989. Guests of their wedding remember one omission from the ceremony: the minister forgot to tell Greg he could “kiss the bride.”
“He just announced us as a married couple,” Greg says. “They started playing the recessional, and you could hear everyone saying, ‘he didn’t let them kiss!’ I had to turn around and ask him, and he said go ahead but make it quick.”
Ever since, the pair have taken every chance they can to kiss and make up for it (as evidenced by the photos below, taken at the 2021 UAB Pathology Holiday Party).
The couple moved to Birmingham following a month-long camping trip, punctuated by nervous check-ins from Dr. Davis’s future boss who, “thought we were never coming.” They went tent camping from San Diego up to Vancouver, British Columbia, across the Canadian Rockies, then down through the Rocky Mountains, before driving home from Denver.
In January 2022, METAvivor Research and Support, a non-profit organization dedicated to funding research for stage IV metastatic breast cancer, announced 26 grant awards totaling $4,050,000. Lalita Shevde-Samant, Ph.D., Professor, Molecular and Cellular Pathology, received a Translational Research Grant award, in memory of Heather Holmes, for her work, "Altering the metastatic immune niche to eradicate established breast cancer metastases."
Shevde-Samant is a senior scientist with the O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center.
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