2008 Annual Meeting and Dinner in Denver

Minutes of the 2008 Meeting

Dear All:

I want to first thank everyone, particularly Dengfeng and Wun-Ju, in making our IACP2008 dinner meeting a great success and a highly enjoyable evening.  I have received many positive feedbacks from the attendees and you all deserve a round of applause for a job well done!

Edgar, Dengfeng, Kar-Ming, Ie-Ming, TC and I had a business luncheon on the same day before our annual dinner.  Dr. TT Wu from Mayo Clinic also joined us as a guest.  Since Gary and Wun-Ju couldn’t make it to the meeting, I thought that I would send this e-mail to update you two, and this would also serve as the minute for our 2008 EC business meeting.  (I am also sending this to Joe Ma for his past and likely continuing role in IACP).   The following summarizes what we discussed:

  1. One important issue discussed was whether we should again approach CAPA for joint BAA for 2009.  The major reason going for the idea would be the largely overlapping pool of the applicants for our BAA and for the BAA of CAPA.  That being said, there are also clear reasons that it would be better for us to continue our own BAA:
    1. A joint BAA would need a joint selection committee, and how this committee would be chosen from the members between IACP and CAPA could be tricky, knowing our past experience of interacting with some CAPA officers.
    2.  BAA should serve the purpose of attracting new pathology trainees to IACP, and this purpose can be better served if the awards remain separate.
    3. Our IACP BAA award includes international applicants from outside of North America and we also encourage the second-generation Chinese pathologists to apply, as well as other applicants such as the spouses of Chinese.  Indeed we had an applicant this year that was Vietnamese but the wife of a Chinese, and the couple attended our dinner.  This all-inclusive policy may not be the case for CAPA, as they place emphasis on Chinese pathologists in North America.
    4. IACP annual dinner and CAPA annual reception at USCAP will remain separate, and if the BAAs are combined, it would be tricky to decide on which occasion this award should be announced.

Based on the considerations above, the four EC members at the meeting, as well as Ie-Ming and TC, unanimously agreed to maintain BAA2009 as an independent IACP award and would not seek to merge with the CAPA BAA award.

2.      The two most important issues that remain to be tackled at this point for IACP are the membership directory and the website.

a.       About IACP website:  The information on our website is very out-dated, and I even had someone wrote to me a few weeks ago, asking whether she should submit membership application to Wenxing Zheng! Kar-Ming expressed that the way that the current IACP was written was such that it was very difficult to make changes.  Edgar also agreed to that.  So the decision was that we would maintain the website address, but Kar-Ming would totally re-write a brand new website for IACP.  Kar-Ming promised that he would have the new website up and running before July 1.

On a side note, Kar-Ming also described his idea of expanding the on-line pathology teaching and quiz materials that he had been working on, currently under the Univ. Okalahoma website and linked to IACP.  Kar-Ming would like to solicit help from IACP members for the contents that he can use for the quiz, and if you have any idea or material that you think would be good for this purpose, please contact Kar-Ming.

b.   About the membership directory:  The last version of the membership directory that we had was from 2006, given to me by Joe Ma.  Many of the listings need to be updated, and many are no longer members.  At the dinner meeting, we would collect and/or update the attendees’ names--both English and Chinese—and their e-mail addresses.  For the ones that wouldn’t be at the dinner, we would try to update the member information using the current e-mail list and the old 2006 directory, and we’ll likely need to contact many of them by e-mail to confirm the information.  (I personally feel that we should have the name, institution name, and e-mail address as the three minimal entries for ever member).  We hope to have an updated version of the directory completed also before July 1, 2008.

3.      The EC members confirmed that there would be no election for new EC member during the dinner meeting this year.  It was unclear to some of us whether the new EC will become effective right after the annual dinner meeting (i.e. Edgar would become president from March 3rd) or that the terms for EC would be from July 1 to June 30.  After consulting with TC and Ie-Ming, we all agreed that it would be better for the new EC to start at July 1, allowing more time for transition and for the current team to complete the unfinished task, such as the membership directory, before shifting everybody’s role in EC.  The new EC composition would be:

President:  Edgar TW Huang

President-Elect: Wun-Ju Shieh

Secretary: Dengfeng Cao

Treasurer: Gary Tse

Executive Vice President (6 year term, webmaster): Kar-Ming Fung

Immediate ex-president: Yao-Tseng Chen

Although Gary will be the new treasurer, since Dengfeng has the IACP checkbook and is now authorized to sign the checks, it was also decided that it would be more convenient for Dengfeng to hold on to the checkbook and sign the checks at least for this coming year.

4.      The above were the main business items that were discussed at the luncheon.  In addition, we discussed the general issues related to IACP.  Everyone was happy that IACP appears to be alive and healthy, and we decided that moving forward, we would try to maintain the “international” spirit that the name of our association implied.  This would include making an effort to invite the overseas USCAP attendees from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Singapore to our annual dinner meeting, as we have done this year.  Also, the two committees that I previously proposed, the IACP-Taiwan interactions committee (Joe Ma, Ie-Ming and TC) and the IACP-China/Hong Kong/Singapore interaction committee (Dengfeng, Gary and Kar-Ming), will be primarily involved in looking into possible opportunities that IACP can interact and contribute to the pathology communities in these regions.  Of course the two committee should feel free to involve other members as they see appropriate, for example, Dengfeng felt that Liang Cheng would be a good person to involve for interactions with mainland China, and HK Ng would likely be also good to involve for Hong Kong interactions.

I think this pretty much sums up what we discussed at the meeting.  If I have forgotten anything important, please remind me so that we keep everyone on the same page.

Thanks again and I hope that you have enjoyed the IACP and USCAP meetings as much as I did!

Best Regards,

Yao

March 2, 2008