By Christina Crowe
The UAB Department of Pathology has named Associate Professor Sixto Leal, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., as Director of the Division of Laboratory Medicine, effective January 1, 2024.
Leal, who was named associate division director in 2022, was selected after an extensive national search to take over from Professor Baleed Vishnu Reddy, M.D., who served as interim division director.
“Dr. Leal is a distinguished physician scientist with wide-ranging expertise in clinical microbiology in general and fungal diseases in particular says Gene Siegal, M.D., Ph.D., Interim Chair, UAB Pathology. His experience and leadership make him an ideal choice, and it is wonderful to receive feedback that from all the candidates potentially available, the best has always resided here at home, at UAB. Additionally, we remain grateful to Dr. Reddy for his selfless contributions to the department, year over year.”
Leal joined the department in 2018 and shortly thereafter found himself mired in the challenge of COVID-19 testing. Due to UAB’s efforts in molecular testing which he led, UAB was among the first academic medical centers in the country to offer in-house testing by launching a laboratory-developed RNA test in March 2020. Leal and his team tested hundreds of samples daily, confirming the presence of the virus in patients with a short turnaround time. This included all inpatient admissions and health care workers, as well as all patients undergoing surgical procedures at UAB Hospital, and labor and delivery patients. Ultimately, a pooled testing strategy developed by Leal and his team allowed for the testing of all statewide college students to allow for their safe return to classes that fall. Subsequent efforts by Leal and his team enabled campus sentinel testing, and establishment of the State of Alabama COVID sequencing initiative. For these efforts, Dr. Leal received the 2020 UAB Faculty Innovator of the Year award.
In 2021, Leal was again recognized for his efforts when he received the UAB Heersink School of Medicine Dean’s Excellence Award for junior faculty. He received multiple sponsored research agreements, pilot awards, a Heersink-funded grant, an American Lung Association grant, and recently an R01 to study post-viral secondary mold infections. In 2022, Leal was named the inaugural scientific director of the Southeastern Biosafety Laboratory Alabama Birmingham, or SEBLAB, one of 12 BSL-3, or biosafety level 3 Regional Biocontainment Laboratories supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The labs were built using grants awarded in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequent anthrax attacks. Their mission is to provide surge capacity for diagnostics medical countermeasure development in the event of a bioterrorism incident or pandemic and lead investigation into vaccines and other treatments for infectious diseases. Under Leal’s leadership, SEBLAB was recently awarded more than $20 million in grant support from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) including a 5-year award seeking to enhance high containment research productivity and pandemic preparedness by supporting operations and biosafety training, implementing cutting-edge technologies, and establishing a scientific research team to provide core laboratory support to the UAB, regional, and national high containment research community.
Dr. Reddy is director, hematopathology and bone marrow for the Kirklin Clinic, and Hematopathology section head for Pathology. He came to UAB more than 30 years ago after having served as a Colonel in the US Army Medical Corps, following his pathology residency. He joined UAB Pathology in 1992 as Hematology Lab Medical Director, a role he has maintained ever since. In this time in the department, Reddy has served as interim director for the divisions of Laboratory Medicine, Anatomic Pathology, and even Neuropathology. In 2019 he received the Dean's Excellence Award for Service for Senior Faculty, and also that year the department dedicated Surgical Pathology Conference Room NP 3554 in his name. In 2021 the department established an endowed professorship in his name, held by C. Ryan Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Division Director, Neuropathology. And in 2022, Reddy was named a UAB President’s Award winner for Excellence in Teaching. He has mentored nearly 200 residents in his time with the department.