Posted on October 7, 2005 at 12:40 p.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — Jay M. McDonald, M.D., professor and chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), has been named recipient of the 2005 Distinguished Lecturer Award, the highest honor UAB bestows on a member of its faculty.
McDonald will present his talk on Thursday, October 20, at The Club, 1 Robert Smith Dr., Homewood. His lecture, “Survival on the Mission to Mars: Columbus had it easy,” will follow a reception and dinner beginning at 6 p.m. Tickets are $30 each. For reservations, call the UAB Events Office at (205) 975-0756.
Throughout his career, McDonald has made major contributions to basic science and to education and research in clinical pathology. He has been a leader in reforming national standards for clinical pathology training and was a major contributing author to a consensus report on standards for laboratory testing for diabetes mellitus. He served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on Creating a Vision for Space Medicine During Travel Beyond Earth Orbit, and most recently, was appointed a member of the NASA Research Partnership Subcommittee. He has been an international leader in establishing clinical pathology as both a basic research and clinical discipline.
McDonald’s research focused for almost 20 years on signal transduction in insulin action. He championed the role of calcium and the intracellular calcium receptor, calmodulin, and G-proteins in insulin action.
In the past 10 years, McDonald’s research has shifted from diabetes to three other major areas of interest: bone disease, cancer pathogenesis and AIDS pathogenesis. Throughout this phase of his research career, he has continued to focus primarily on the role of calcium and calmodulin as a signal transducer.
McDonald received his undergraduate degree from Tufts University and his medical degree, with distinction, from Wayne State University, where he also completed a pathology residency and was chief resident from 1973 to 1974. He did an internship in internal medicine at the University of Oregon and a post-doctoral research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. He came to UAB following 10 years on the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine.
He is director of a National Institutes of Health-funded Center for Metabolic Bone Disease at UAB, one of five in the United States, and is a senior scientist at UAB’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, Center for AIDS Research, Center for Aging, Gene Therapy Center, Center for Health Promotion and Cell Adhesion Matrix Research Center. McDonald is board-certified in anatomic and clinical pathology. He has published over 180 scientific manuscripts and serves as editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Pathology, the leading experimental pathology journal.