05/27/2025
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!!!
This particular phrase “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” is, at the very least, rather enigmatic/quirky from the perspective that this is supposed to be my Good-Bye letter. The date (6/1/25) is rapidly approaching when I will step away from leading the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy here at LSUHS-Shreveport after 9 years (more or less) in that capacity. I will still be kicking around the campus for quite some time, but as member of the faculty in Cellular Biology and Anatomy.
I also want to extend a warm welcome to my replacement, Hind Lal, Ph.D., who will take over the leadership of the Department on June 1. I am looking forward to working with Dr. Lal in his role of leading the department to bigger and better accomplishments!
So, why the title?
The phrase itself “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!!! is the title of the 4th book from the series “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by the British author, Douglas Adams. In that book, the phrase was puzzling message delivered to the humans of Earth by the planet’s dolphin population. In the story line, they decided it was time leave the planet that had been their home for their entire evolution, choosing to leave Earth en masse and move onto better hunting grounds. (it is a bit more complicated than that, but for the sake of space I will not elaborate). As the dolphins in that book, I had decided in January of 2022 to move onward to better hunting grounds. It has been 3.5 years since that tough decision, but I know I am leaving the department in good hands.
I have been at home here LSUHS-Shreveport for 28 years of my academic career, the last nine years having the honor of leading the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy. Although I feel I have left the Department in a better state than when I first took over, the progress that the Department made over the course of those years could not have been possible without the effort and hard work of our Staff, Faculty and Students. To everyone in the Department I want to say a sincere THANK YOU!
A Long List of Thanks!
Departmental Staff is the heart and soul of any department. None of the faculty or students could ever survive for long without your efforts! I would like to give a special thanks to my Administrative Staff, Rachel Webster and Jennifer Harper, for taking care of all of us during my time as Chair. We all knew who really ran the department, and both of you did an amazing job for all of us! You kept us from going off the rails so many times!!!!!
Our primary mission is to teach Anatomical Sciences to Medical, Allied Health, and Graduate Students. We could have never accomplished much of this work without the efforts of Allean McGowan Pratt and Virgil (Addison) Lacy IV, our two Funeral Directors. Allean has been the Director of our Willed Body Program for >30 years and Addison has been our running our Anatomy Laboratory Services for 6 years. Thank you both for showing the care and respect to our Body Donors and to their Families. It is your hard work that makes our Program the success that it is!
I need to thank Jianfeng Liu, MD who has led our Histology Research Core Facility for the past 6 years. He has kept the facility equipment operational and continues to provide key histology services for our faculty and laboratories across the campus. His enthusiasm is contagious, and his entrepreneurial spirit is wonderful. Thank you for believing in my idea to grow the scope of our operations over these years.
Thank you to our newest staff member, Balasundari Ramesh, Ph.D., for her dedication to furthering research in our department.
I want to thank everyone on our faculty who have worked and continue to work tirelessly to teach our students and move our research programs forward! To David DeSha, I want to thank you for your wisdom and guidance over the past decades. Your mentorship and dedication as an Educator continues to bring out the best in all of us! You have now outlasted 55 years-worth of Department Chairs! I want to also thank my anatomy laboratory tank partner, Gary Bazer, for his belief and dedication to our 3D anatomy project. It was his talent as an Anatomist and his quips/puns during those long laboratory sessions that has kept me going forward in this endeavor. My thanks to Kathryn Hamilton-your willingness to step in at the right time and give solid, meaningful advice when I was facing a troublesome situation, is (and was) much appreciated! I always felt that you served as the “conscience” of the Department! Thanks to Hong Sun—I always referred to him as my favorite faculty member over the past 9 years because he never, ever caused me any grief!!! Your kindness and thoughtful demeanor were often a bright spot in some of those dismal days! A special thanks to Manikandan Panchatcharam for his inherent ability to bring my day-today existence in the department out of the doldrums! To my colleague Adegbenro Fakoya, your enthusiasm, talent, creativity, and energy in managing our curriculum has been truly inspirational to all of us in the Department. We will all be relying on your leadership in the coming years to continue the excellence of our Anatomical Sciences Curriculum! Krista Rodgers was my first faculty recruit when I was a newly minted Departmental Chair. During her recruiting visit she impressed all of us when she offered to hold an impromptu chalk-talk about the future directions of her research program….and gamely fielded all types of difficult questions from the attendees. Thank you for your “Can Do” attitude and amazing work ethic—you bailed myself and the Department out of quite a few troublesome situations over these past 5 years! I want to thank my second faculty hire, Taichiro Nonaka, for his quiet, dogged persistence in overcoming obstacles that seemed to pop up as he tried to start his research program during the middle of the COVID pandemic. I don’t know if I could have had the patience to endure all the laboratory construction setbacks that plagued the campus during COVID! Despite all the handicaps that you did encounter in those first years, you are definitely on a roll now! Thank you to our newest faculty hire, Hosne Ara, whose talents in the Anatomical Sciences have impressed the faculty and students alike!
Thank you to all our wonderful graduate students who decided to matriculate in the department. I have really enjoyed interacting with all of you over all these years! Our current class of students in the department is one of the best groups of students that we have had yet! It has been an honor and pleasure to get to know every one of you!
I want to take a moment to recognize and thank the anatomy Teaching Assistants from the Class of 2025 (Mary Melancon, Abigayle Castine, Elise Thibodeaux, Noah Young, and Liam Ordoyne) for all their hard work in making the Gross Anatomy Course for the Class of 2026 a resounding success!!! At the time when our Anatomical Sciences team was short-staffed due to the sudden/unexpected loss of two teaching faculty, these five former student Teaching Assistants gamely stepped in and helped the department move forward with the Fall 2022 Gross Anatomy Course.
And to the Medical School Class of 2026……. you will always be my favorites!!! I had the most fun of my academic career here at LSUHS-S working with all of you in Gross Anatomy! With luck, I will see you all at next year’s graduation ceremony!
Thank you, G.E Ghali, former Chancellor of LSUHS-S, for your trust when you asked me to lead the Department through the difficult time we all faced as an institution. And thank you Chris Kevil, for the support, advice, and friendship you gave me over the years.
The most important THANK YOU goes to my wife and long-time research collaborator Deborah. First, thank you for your willingness to share me and my time when I was asked by Dr. Ghali to take over the leadership of the Department back in 2016. I realize that the decision was a difficult one because we had both planned to spend our final years at LSUHS just quietly doing our research. You knew it would divert attention away from what we really loved to do…and you were definitely right! By stepping out of our cloistered lab, however, and working together in an entirely new direction over these past nine years the both of us were able to help many colleagues and students upwards on the career ladder.
Second, thank you for being my “Muse” for the past 38 years. The synergy that we developed between us over the course of our research career together was nothing short of remarkable! We accomplished research that, years ago, colleagues skeptical of our direction thought we could not meet our goals. But we published the resulting work, the research now confirmed by other laboratories.
Third, let’s face it, it has been tough for us these last several months as we shut down the laboratory as it has existed for these past 28 years here at LSUHS-S. When one walks down the path of shutting down a laboratory, you are packing up your professional home in which you lived for quite some time. Twenty-eight years’ worth of specimens, slides, data, reagents, supplies, equipment is not easy to shoehorn into multiple boxes!!! The process is poignant but difficult.
Every time we opened a drawer to pack equipment, specimens, etc, there would be a reminder of projects that worked and those that ended up being dead ends for one reason or another. There were subtle reminders of our former students throughout the laboratory, even finding residual radioactive specimens from their experiments tucked away deep in our cold cabinets. Digging through and cataloguing their laboratory notebooks during this time was another trip down memory lane.
In any case, it was the adventure of the hunt, seeking answers to many questions, that kept us interested in taking the next step in our research. As we now move forward with McCarthylab version 3.0, I hope that, once again, the reinvention of our work's direction will keep both of us seeking new vistas in science.
So long for now, and thank you to everyone I encountered on my journey here at LSUHS-Shreveport!
