Dear SCVP Member,

 

As we are deep into December, I thought it would be a good time to talk about our accomplishments over the past year and what we have to look forward to in 2022. 2021 was a mixed year of successes, challenges, and some sadness.

 

We have recently learned of the passing of Dr. Sherman Bloom, who laid the groundwork for our society and served as our first president in 1986. Dr. Bloom conceived of the idea for our society and served on the initial steering committee with Avrum Gotlieb, Fred Schoen, Stephen Factor, Colin Bloor and Bill Edwards. His imprint on our society, which includes designing our logo, cannot be overstated and we wish his widow, Miriam, our heartfelt condolences.

 

This past year was certainly a challenge for all of us due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic, which has upset our daily routines, increased most people’s stress levels, and made travel difficult to impossible. As you all recall, the entire USCAP and our SCVP companion meeting were virtual back in March. Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of Dylan Miller and Joe Maleszewski, we put on an excellent program covering SARS-CoV-2 and the heart while also hearing excellent Young Investigator talks. We also initiated a new SCVP365 initiative to keep our society active throughout the year.

 

Since March, we have maintained societal activities through our What I know/What I don’t know seminar series. These talks, given by experts in the field of cardiovascular pathology, have aimed to inform and to point out areas in need of continued discovery. Talks have been given by Jeff Saffitz, Rene Rodriguez, Barbara Sampson, Renu Virmani, and Michaela Noseda. We are working on our lineup for 2022 and are pleased that Chuck Murry has agreed to speak. We also began a mentorship program with a great kickoff seminar given by Fred Schoen.

 

Our membership has continued to grow and we have looked for ways to expand our outreach. Working with Elsevier and our publisher Lindsay Allen, we have agreed to a one-year pilot program to offer membership at a reduced rate to individuals from resource limited countries. More information is to come on this rollout. A big thank you to Pete Anderson, Melanie Bois and their committees for working through these challenges. If you joined the society this year, you likely received a friendly email from Andrew Layman welcoming you to our society.

 

We also rolled out a new mentorship program this past year thanks to the work of Chieh-Yu Lin and Melanie Bois. This program brought together junior members and senior members with shared interests with the goal of providing more mentoring to young members to keep them engaged in their careers in the cardiovascular field.

 

Our educational offerings have also continued to expand in 2021. We built a new web-based tutorial on electron microscopy findings thanks to the work of Carolyn Glass and Melanie Bois. Our two consensus projects on Sudden Cardiac Death in Young and Temporal Arteritis have taken on new urgency this year with the first project nearing the finish line, led by Karen Kelly and the second being reinvigorated by Vidhya Nair. We have also begun a multi-year project to revisit the diagnosis of myocarditis. We appreciate all of you who filled out a survey for the first project led by Monica De Gaspari and Chieh-Yu Lin and hope to have a manuscript from this work in 2022. Finally, Melanie Bois has been kind enough to share with us her Twitter-based cardiovascular quiz cases for us to use for our COM’on (Case of the Month) project and we are now rolling out cases twice monthly for this. A big thank you to new member Grace Choung for her help in coding these pages. Look forward to a cardiovascular pathology-themed journal club that Brandon Larsen and his committee is trying to put together to roll out next year.

 

As we look toward 2022, the big event we are gearing up for is our annual meeting occurring in Los Angeles from March 19-24. A few details are still being resolved. We are planning an extended Saturday session including our Mary Ann Sens Open Microscope Event. We will be having our Sunday evening banquet at Fogo de Chao (thank you Mathieu Castonguay) to roast and honor our Distinguished Achievement Awardee, Richard Mitchell. Our Sunday morning event is entitled “Racially Related Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease” and was developed by Dylan Miller and the programming committee.

 

In publications, we have two developments to note. The first is that Cardiovascular Pathology, fifth edition, edited by L. Maximilian Buja and Jagdish Butany will be available in January. Many of the chapters were written by our members and this is an excellent reference book for you all to obtain. I look forward to buying one. Secondly, through the hard work of Max Buja to publish many highly-cited COVID-related manuscripts including a very early autopsy report that has been cited over 250 times, we expect a significant increase in the impact factor of our journal, Cardiovascular Pathology. There has never been a better time to submit your work to our journal.

 

Many of the accomplishments of the past year are the result of members, just like you, requesting these improvements. We hope to hear more of your great ideas in the coming year and we will work to implement them. I look forward to a safe, healthy, and productive 2022 for you all. See you in L.A.!

 

 

 

 

Marc K. Halushka, MD, PhD

President, Society for Cardiovascular Pathology