Dean McGee Awards Endowed Chairs, Professorship

By: Journal Record Staff February 3, 2015

OKLAHOMA CITY (JR) – The Dean McGee Eye Institute announced that four endowed chairs and one endowed professorship have been awarded to faculty members at the institute and in the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology.

The newly created David W. Parke II MD Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology was awarded to R. Michael Siatkowski, a pediatric ophthalmologist who previously held the James P. Luton Endowed Chair. Before joining the Dean McGee Eye Institute in 1999, Siatkowski served on the faculty of the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, where he completed his fellowship training.

David Parke II, for whom this endowed chair is named, was the president of the Eye Institute from 1992 to 2009. He is the current executive vice president and CEO of the 32,000-member American Academy of Ophthalmology.

The Stanton L. Young Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology was awarded to Dean McGee Eye Institute vision researcher Daniel J.J. Carr, who was the M.G. McCool Professor of Ophthalmology. Also a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Carr and his laboratory focus on herpes simplex virus-1 and the ocular immune system.

He joined the faculty at the Dean McGee Eye Institute and OU in 1999 after rising to the rank of associate professor at Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. Carr is the program committee chairman for the Immunology/Microbiology section of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. He is also a Presbyterian Health Foundation Presidential Professor and served as assistant dean for the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at the OU Health Sciences Center from 2010 to 2014.

Stanton L. Young was one of the founders of the Dean McGee Eye Institute. He retired as chairman of the Oklahoma Eye Foundation in 2011 and as a member of the DMEI board of trustees and chairman of the DMEI Foundation in 2012.

The James P. Luton Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology was awarded to Michelle C. Callegan, a professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and associate director of research for the Oklahoma Center for Neuroscience.

After completing her postdoctoral fellowship training in the Department of Ophthalmology at OUHSC, Callegan was appointed to a full-time tenure-track faculty position in 1999 and achieved the rank of professor in 2011. With a research emphasis on the pathogenesis and treatment of bacterial ocular infections, she has a strong record of research support from the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies and has more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Callegan is past program committee chairman for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology’s Immunology/Microbiology.

James P. Luton was an Oklahoma City ophthalmologist and member of the Dean McGee Eye Institute board of trustees. The James P. Luton Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology was established in his memory after his death in 1996.

The M.G. McCool Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology was awarded to Raju V. S. Rajala. Rajala is a vision scientist at Dean McGee Eye Institute who is a professor in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Physiology and adjunct professor in the Department of Cell Biology in the OU College of Medicine.

He also serves as a module director for DMEI’s National Eye Institute core grant and as mentoring faculty in the Oklahoma Center for Neuroscience. After joining the laboratory of Robert E. Anderson in 1999, Dr. Rajala was appointed to a tenure-track faculty position in 2003 and was promoted to professor in 2013.

M.G. McCool, for whom this endowed chair was created by his friends and colleagues in 1997, was an Oklahoma City businessman and the first president of the original Oklahoma Eye Foundation established in 1965. He and his wife Lucille were generous donors to DMEI.

The inaugural recipient of the W. Stanley Muenzler Endowed Professorship in Corneal Disease is Alex W. Cohen, a corneal specialist and assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology in the OU College of Medicine. He completed his ophthalmology residency and a fellowship in cornea/external disease/refractive surgery at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and was recruited to the Dean McGee Eye Institute in 2011.

The endowed professorship was established in 2014 to honor the memory of one W. Stanley Muenzler, a corneal surgeon who practiced ophthalmology in Oklahoma City for almost 50 years. He died in 2013 at the age of 81.