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.
Sigma Xi, a national scientific research honor society, announced the cohort's inductees in August, and Siegal was sworn in during their annual meeting the first week of November: https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/article/2020/08/03/announcing-the-inaugural-cohort-of-sigma-xi-fellows. The Fellow of Sigma Xi distinction is awarded on a competitive basis to members who have been recognized by their peers. Fellows must be an active (dues-paying), full member for the last 10 years continuously, or a life member, with distinguished service to Sigma Xi and outstanding contributions to the scientific enterprise.
From their site:
Dr. Siegal distinguished educator who is the Robert W. Mowry Endowed Professor of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and executive vice-chair of Pathology at UAB Medicine, in Birmingham, Alabama. Since January 2018, he has also served as the interim chair of the Department of Genetics at UAB. He is an experimental and diagnostic pathologist whose research interest, for over four decades, has been focused on cancer biology. His clinical research interests have centered on studies of bone tumors and related conditions, a field in which he is a recognized world authority.
Among multiple honor societies, Siegal is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London and Phi Beta Delta, Honor Society for International Scholars. He has just completed a six-year term on the Mayo Clinic Alumni Association Board of Directors and currently serves on the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society and Educational Foundation Board of Trustees. He has published more than 700 peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, abstracts and other professional writings, along with nine books. He is the current editor-in-chief of Laboratory Investigation and is the 2019–2020 president of the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP).
Siegal completed medical school at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky, his residency at the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota, and a PhD at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He completed fellowships at Mayo, the University of Minnesota, and at the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland.
He has been a member of Sigma Xi for more than four decades, having been elected to membership as a young graduate student. He remained active on the local level while in Minnesota and Maryland but made a commitment to simultaneously “pay it forward” and “give back” when he joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty, eventually serving as the president of the chapter and helped the Society-wide organization transfer its corporate headquarters to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, from New England. Eventually, he moved to UAB and returned to his previous role as a minor player. In 2018, he was appointed to the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Development and was elected to Sigma Xi’s Committee on Finances for a three-year term, for which he currently serves.