President’s Message June 2015

I hope everyone is doing well as the 2014-2015 academic year is about to end. Our Companion Meeting that was held during the USCAP Annual Meeting in Boston this past March was well-attended and a great success. We garnered high marks and positive feedback from the attendees. Congratulations are in order to all the speakers for this achievement.

The society membership voted upon the proposed modifications to the HPHS By-Laws during the Business Meeting that immediately followed the Companion Meeting. One of the changes that was approved included formalizing the creation of a Website Committee. Its inaugural chair, Arief Suriawinata, reported that the Interesting Case Series published in both the Newsletter and the HPHS website resulted in a record number of web visits (page views). As an aside, as of today, June 15, 2015, per Arief, there have been 16,742 visits to the website. This huge increase is mainly due to the Case Series that is being made available to the general public.

This Case Series section would not have been possible without the Education Committee’s dedication and resolve to generate interesting cases under the leadership of Oyedele Adeyi and the section editor, Cynthia Guy. In addition to the Cases, a new section, Journal Watch, was proposed by Dele Adeyi, which the Exec Com approved today. This will commence in the next issue of the Newsletter. This tremendous accomplishment is giving greater visibility to liver pathology and our Society. This Newsletter would not be possible without the Newsletter Committee chaired by Bita Naini and its very active members, Steve Ward, Erin Rubin and Cynthia Behling, who have worked very hard to keep this Newsletter coming out on a regular basis.

The Membership Committee members chaired by Maha Guindi were kept busy as the USCAP meeting was approaching because applications for membership were at an all-time high this year. A total of 22 were approved for membership (11 regular, 10 associate and 1 international). The By-Laws were also modified to include deliberations for membership to occur quarterly or even on a rolling basis as the need arises. This will hopefully result in keeping a potential member to be interested in the society and not wait for several months before a decision is made.

The HPHS was involved in putting together the liver pathology program at the Asia Pacific International Academy of Pathology that was held in Brisbane two weeks ago. The speakers included Yoh Zen, Yasuni Nakanuma, Young-Nyun Park, Andrew Clouston and Anthony Chan. This was also a successful meeting.

I am lucky to have the help and counsel from the other members of the Executive Committee: Michael Torbenson (incoming President), Matthew Yeh (Past President) and Grace Kim (Secretary-Treasurer) who work diligently behind the scenes but equally share in the responsibilities and challenges of keeping our Society flourishing.

The next newsletter will be published in three months and there will be more to come. I wish everyone a great summer.

Hans Popper Hepatopathology Society