Sixto Leal Jr., M.D., Ph.D., Division Director, Laboratory Medicine, has been named the Jay M. McDonald Endowed Professor in Experimental Pathology, effective January 1, 2025.
Leal joined the department in 2018 and shortly thereafter found himself tackling 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 medical countermeasure development in the event of a bioterrorism incident or pandemic and lead investigation into diagnostics, vaccines and other treatments for infectious diseases. Under Leal’s leadership, SEBLAB was 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. Leal was named Director of the Division of Laboratory Medicine in 2024 after having served as associate division director in 2022.
Dr. and Mrs. Jay M. McDonald established the Jay M. McDonald Endowed Professor in Experimental Pathology with an initial gift in 2014 that became fully endowed in 2018. McDonald’s academic career spanned three decades and included Directorship of the Division of Laboratory Medicine in the Departments of Pathology and Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis for 10 years prior to his recruitment to UAB in 1990 to chair the department. He served as chair of UAB Pathology from 1990-2008 and was Editor-in-Chief of the primary pathology research journal, The American Journal of Pathology, from 2003-2008. He directed an NIH-funded Center for Metabolic Bone Disease—one of five in the country—from 1996-2010.