Written by Mary Ashley Canevaro
An appointment to an endowed chair or professorship is among the highest academic honors a faculty member can receive. The School of Medicine holds a remarkable 193 endowed chairs and 103 endowed professorship positions. These honors contribute to recruitment and retention of premier teachers, clinicians, and researchers.
Endowed chairs and professorships give donors the chance to link their names to an area of special interest within the university. Some donors choose to direct their gifts to endowing a chair or professorship in the academic discipline that inspired them, while others may direct their gifts to create scholarships or fellowships for deserving students, or to support medical research of particular importance to them.
Gene Siegal, M.D., Ph.D., Robert. W. Mowry Endowed Professor, Anatomic Pathology, and Interim Chair, UAB Department of Genetics, was recently sworn in as a member of the inaugural class of fellows, Sigma Xi, "for distguished contributions as a physician scientist and for exemplary scholarship as a teacher, mentor, author, reviewer and editor, and as a leader in academic medicine."
"With the challenges facing science in general and Sigma Xi, in particular, it became clear to me that it is once again time to come forward to support this eminent society which was so important to my own success and sense of self worth and assure its stabilization and growth into this next century," Siegal says.
Lalita Samant, Ph.D., Professor, Molecular & Cellular Pathology and Senior Scientist, O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, has been elected as a Board member for the Cancer Biology Training Consortium (CABTRAC).
CABTRAC is a national organization that that serves as a forum for faculty leaders in cancer education and training at their respective Institution. It provides a platform to institute mechanisms and guidelines in cancer training – at all levels.
Selvarangan Ponnazhagan, Ph.D., Professor, Molecular and Cellular Pathology, received a $80,000 research grant from UAB's O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center using funds provided by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama (BCRFA) to fund his research proposal titled, "Combinatorial genetic immunotherapy and RANKL antagonism for breast cancer."
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