Two of our distinguished professors have been appointed to endowed professorships:
Yabing Chen, Ph.D, Professor, Molecular & Cellular Pathology and Vice Chair, Faculty Development and Education, is appointed to the Jay M. McDonald, M.D., Endowed Professorship in Laboratory Medicine.
C. Ryan Miller, M.D., Ph.D., Division Director and Professor, Neuropathology, is appointed to the Translational Research Endowed Professorship in Pathology.
Dr. Chen joined the department in 2005. She is professor and Vice Chair, Faculty Development and Education, as well as director of the Pathobiology, Pharmacology and Physiology Graduate Program. Chen is a senior scientist in the Center for Aging and the Center for Comprehensive Diabetes, and a scientist in the centers for metabolic bone disease, the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Center for Free Radical Biology and the Nutrition Obesity Research Center.
Chen is recognized for her work training and mentoring graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members in the department and across UAB. Her efforts in education and mentoring have earned her the UAB Graduate School’s Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentorship in 2016 and the School of Medicine Dean’s Excellence Award for Mentorship in 2019.
Her research focuses on uncovering the molecular mechanisms of the regulation of vascular smooth muscle cells that contribute to the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, including vascular calcification in atherosclerosis, arterial stiffness, diabetic vasculopathy as well as vascular aging. Her work has been continuously funded by grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and American Heart Association (AHA). In 2016 she received a Research Career Scientist Award from the VA Research Department, and in 2018 Chen received the prestigious Vascular Biology Special Recognition Award from the American Heart Association’s Council on Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology.
Dr. and Mrs. Jay M. McDonald established the Jay M. McDonald M.D., Endowed Professorship in Laboratory Medicine with an initial gift in 2014 that became fully endowed in 2018.
C. Ryan Miller, M.D., Ph.D., joined the department this spring as Division Director, Neuropathology, coming from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where he was faculty director of the UNC Translational Pathology Laboratory. Miller completed a Ph.D. at UAB in 1999 prior to medical school, in the department’s Cellular & Molecular Pathology Graduate Program.
Dr. Miller’s research interests focus on novel treatment approaches for malignant gliomas based on molecular alterations for tumorigenesis, using proteomic molecular analyses. He serves on the neuropathology and neuro-oncology committees of the National Cancer Institute’s Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology.