Dr. Richard F. Leighton Receives Alumni Professional Achievement Award from McDaniel College

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Dr. Richard F. Leighton

WESTMINSTER, MD (11/06/2012)(readMedia)-- Dr. Richard F. Leighton of Savannah, Ga., has received the alumni professional achievement award from McDaniel College. He is a 1951 alumnus of Western Maryland (now McDaniel) College.

Presented annually during McDaniel's Homecoming, the alumni professional achievement award is given to a graduate who has gained distinction in his/her chosen field or profession and whose accomplishments reflect admirably on McDaniel College.

Dr. Richard F. Leighton has been passionate about cardiology since his father suffered from coronary disease and had a series of heart attacks while he was in medical school at the University of Maryland. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1955, he joined the U.S. Navy and became a flight surgeon.

He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiology at the Ohio State University where he subsequently was a faculty member and directed the cardiac catheterization laboratories. In 1974, he was appointed professor of medicine and the first chief of cardiology at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo where he is credited with building the coronary care unit. In 1990, he became vice president for academic affairs and dean of college, a position he held until 1996.

In 1997, he moved to Georgia, where he chairs the Institutional Review Boards at Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, and is a clinical professor of medicine at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, teaching second- and third-year medical students.

Dr. Leighton is a fellow and past Governor for Ohio of the American College of Cardiology, an emeritus fellow of several councils of the American Heart Association, an emeritus member of the Association of University Cardiologists and a member of the Societie Francaise de Cardiologie. He has been selected for Best Doctors in America three times, and was named America's Top Cardiologists in 2007 and 2008. He holds an honorary degree from the Medical College of Ohio and is a recipient of the Honor Award and Gold Key from the Medical Alumni Association of the University of Maryland. He is the author and coauthor of 85 articles and eight book chapters in the field of cardiovascular medicine.

For more information about McDaniel College, visit www.mcdaniel.edu.

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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among "40 Colleges that Change Lives" and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 20 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel's degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.