2009 Ward Burdick Award for UAB Director

Awardee is a leader in reforming and maintaining standards for pathology training

The director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Center for Metabolic Bone Disease has won the 2009 Ward Burdick Award for Distinguished Service to Clinical Pathology from the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP).

Jay M. McDonald, M.D., a professor in the UAB Department of Pathology, is a leader in reforming and maintaining national standards for clinical pathology training. McDonald helped author the current highest standards for laboratory testing of diabetes mellitus samples and has been an international leader in establishing clinical pathology as both a basic research and clinical discipline.

McDonald 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 BioMatrix Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Center. He is the immediate-past chair of the UAB Department of Pathology, and was pathologist-in-chief at UAB Hospital from 1990 to 2008.

McDonald has served on the external review committees of pathology and laboratory-medicine departments at numerous medical institutions around the nation and is a past president of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists. He is on the editorial boards of three scientific journals and is the immediate-past editor in chief of the American Journal of Pathology. McDonald has published more than 200 scientific manuscripts.

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. His research focuses on the role of calcium and calmodulin as intracellular signal transducers.

The annual ASCP distinguished service award was established in 1929 to commemorate Ward Burdick, M.D., a major organizer of the society in 1922 and its secretary until 1928. The only other UAB faculty member to have won this award thus far was Roy Kracke, M.D., in 1935. Kracke was the first dean of the Medical College of Alabama, the predecessor of the UAB School of Medicine.