Dear SCVP Member,
As we enter July I am excited about the wonderful activities taking place throughout the society and I thought it would be useful to share these with all of our members.
Dr. Barbara Sampson will be giving a seminar entitled “Using the Molecular Autopsy to Understand Sudden Cardiac Death and More” on Wednesday, July 21st at 10 EDT (7 PDT, 2 PM GMT). This is the third seminar in the series, with excellent presentations already given by Drs. Jeff Saffitz and Rene Rodriguez that are available for viewing in the members only section of our webpage. Moving forward, I am pleased to report that Dr. Renu Virmani will be speaking in October and Dr. Michela Noseda will be speaking in November on the identification of heart cells in the Human Cell Atlas program.
The USCAP is currently planning an in person meeting for March 19-24, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. Consistent with that, the SCVP is busy planning our in person companion events. Please save the date with more information to come. We are preparing to celebrate another Distinguished Achievement Awardee at the event and we look forward to seeing you all then.
If you have not heard, the latest impact factor for our journal, Cardiovascular Pathology, is 2.185, up from 1.756 the year earlier. Congratulations to Max Buja, Giulia Ottaviani and the entire editorial board. Even more exciting, due to the excellent, and highly-cited, COVID-related papers in the journal in 2020, we are anticipating a large bump in the impact factor in 2022 that should put us on par with general science journals such as PLoSOne and Scientific Reports. I am requesting that each of our members send at least one high quality cardiovascular science manuscript to the journal in this coming year. All of those papers will be able to “ride the wave” of the impending impact factor boost. The only way we will maintain this higher impact factor is the continuing contributions of our members’ articles and reviews to the journal.
The Web committee has rolled out a new educational series of cases to extend our Case of the Month (COM’on) program. Dr. Melanie Bois, who has been running a weekly Twitter cardiovascular quiz, has been kind enough to share these materials with us. These quizzes are a nice refresher for our more senior members and a good learning tool for our trainee members. Look for them to come out on a roughly bi-weekly basis going forward.
Additionally, our mentorship program is up and running, we are planning a journal club series, we continue to grow with new trainees members, and we have a number of active committees planning exciting things for our membership. The future is bright!
Marc K. Halushka, MD, PhD
President, Society for Cardiovascular Pathology
