The Academy is doing quite well. The Education Committee under the leadership of Dr. Jeffrey Myers has scheduled sixty short courses, sixteen evening specialty conferences and twenty-three companion meetings. A total of 2098 abstracts were submitted. These included a record number of 463 abstracts submitted for the Stowell-Orbison Award for Pathologists-in-Training competition indicating a high level of interest of our junior members in pathology investigations. Abstracts were submitted from approximately 430 different medical institutions. Of these, 252 institutions were in the U.S. or Canada and the remaining 178 from throughout the world. Approximately 5,000 individuals regularly contribute to the excellence of the overall annual meeting program if you include all contributing authors for abstracts and faculty for the various offerings at the meeting. Over 98 % of the abstracts were submitted online indicating the rapid acceptance and convenience of this new technology.

The Long Course will cover Epidermal Neoplasms and Co-Directors are Drs. Bruce R. Smoller and A. Neil Crowson. An outstanding faculty will be presenting in this practical and challenging area of pathology and a CD will be included with the syllabus for the course.

The molecular courses have been well received in past years. This year's Basic Molecular Pathology Course will be directed by Drs. Julia Bridge and Margie Scott, while the Advanced Molecular Pathology Course will be directed by Dr. Fred Barr. As in the past, many new and rapidly developing concepts and technological advances will be presented.

The Nathan Kaufman Timely Topics Lecture will be delivered by Nobel Laureate Dr. Phillip Sharp from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will discuss - The Biological and Potentially Therapeutic Activities of Short RNAs.

The Maude Abbott Lecture, - The Surgical Pathologist and the History of Breast Disease - will be presented by Dr. David Page of Vanderbilt University.

The Academy will present awards to several individuals who have served the Academy and have contributed to new developments in Academic Pathology: The Mostofi Award for service to the Academy will be given to Dr. Ronald DeLellis. The Distinguished Pathologist Award will honor two outstanding pathologists - Drs. Bruce Beckwith and Robert Collins. The President's Award will go to Dr. Andrew Huvos for his generous and continued service to the Academy with an outstanding record of presenting short courses over many decades.

The USCAP staff in the Augusta office remains the backbone of the USCAP with their continued excellent running of the day-to-day operations which always exceeds expectations at the Annual Meeting. Special thanks and appreciation go to Mr. Jim Crimmins, Ms. Jo Ann Johnson, Ms. Carolyn Lane, Ms. Linda Haygood and Mrs. Kerry Crockett, who joined the USCAP staff in November as Assistant Administrator. Dr. Fred Silva almost seamlessly directs the overall operation, providing humor as well as great leadership, and he deserves our special thanks.

The Diagnostic Pathology Course was well received with a great deal of enthusiasm under the directorship of Drs. Sylvia Asa and Gregory Fuller. The 1100 page handout and CD with over 3700 images has been greatly appreciated by the participants. Its 18^th presentation in July 2005 will be in Santa Barbara, CA.

The new USCAP Course on Diagnostic Cytopathology, directed by Dr. Celeste N. Powers with an outstanding faculty, was presented for the first time at Fort Lauderdale, Florida from January 14 - 16, 2005. It was well attended, well received and has continued the tradition of excellent offerings by the Academy. It had a 700 page handout and a CD with over a thousand images.

In October 2004, several members of the Executive Committee and Council attended the International Academy of Pathology Meeting in Brisbane. This was an excellent and very successful meeting.

Our website continues to be very successful with excellent and abundant educational material including materials from the specialty conferences, companion meetings, short courses and all abstracts for the past three years. The abstracts can be searched for by topic, disease, author and technology. In September, October and November of 2004 we had 1.6 million, 1.2 million and 1.1 million hits per month, respectively with approximately 9,000 unique visitors per month. The Table of Contents for the Educational Programs on our website includes 19 organs/subspecialties with over 500 individual educational entries already up.

The membership continues to grow with a current membership of over 9,300. This includes over 1,800 junior members. Membership recruitment has been very successful due in large part to the leadership and person efforts of Dr. Fred Silva as well as the Ambassador's Program (initiated in 2000 by Dr. Elaine Jaffe and the Ad HOC Membership Committee).

The society's journals continue to thrive with the change of publishers to Nature Publishing Group. The new editor of Laboratory Investigation, Dr. James Crawford, has outlined many innovative ideas for this journal. Dr. John Eble has done similar things for Modern Pathology.

Long-term Strategic Planning Committees were initiated under the guidance of Drs. David Hardwick and Jeffrey Myers. Dr. Myers and the members of the Education Committee are continuing to work diligently on long term planning of educational endeavors for the future of the Academy. This year several new initiatives for housestaff are being scheduled during the Annual Meeting: (Fellowship Fair, Specialty Conference, and Hospitality Room).

It is certainly a great honor to serve as President of the USCAP this year. The Academy has provided continuous intellectual stimulation for me for more than over two decades and it has also been a great meeting place to present new ideas and learn a great deal from colleagues.

I wish you all a successful meeting in San Antonio.

Ricardo V. Lloyd, M.D., Ph.D.
Mayo Clinic
Rochester, MN



Dr. Lloyd grew up on the former Panama Canal Zone. After college, he enrolled in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. He also trained in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Madison, and then did a Fellowship in Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

His interest in the endocrine system dates back to his years in graduate and medical school. In medical school he was fascinated by the many intricacies and morphological details of histology and pathology and decided to pursue a career in pathology. His enthusiasm for endocrine pathology was inspired by the integral relationship between morphology and function encountered in many endocrine disorders. Along the way his career choices were influenced by many individuals including Drs. W. H. McShan and H. J. Karavolas, outstanding endocrine researchers, Dr. Henry Pitot at McCardle Laboratories, by Drs. Reza Hafez and Tom Warner in Surgical Pathology in Madison and Dr. Kallaman Kovacs at the University of Toronto.

Pathology was at the forefront in the medical center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with an active tissue procurement group for research, which was years ahead of its time. The Pathology Department under Dr. Myron Melamed and Surgical Pathology under Dr. Phillip Liebeman had many outstanding role models including Drs. Paul Peter Rosen, James Woodruff, Steven Hajdu, Andrew Huvos and Stephen Sternberg. Dr. Sternberg’s innovative American Journal of Surgical Pathology was still in its infancy with bimonthly publications at that time. Dr. Lloyd applied immunohistochemical techniques used in his doctoral research work to diagnostic pathology at Memorial Hospital.

Dr. Lloyd subsequently joined the Pathology Department at the University of Michigan where he found a stimulating environment for the study of endocrine diseases from the surgical perspective with Dr. Norman Thompson and in Clinical Endocrinology with Dr. Jim Sisson. The Pathology Department at Michigan with its long history of excellence continued in this tradition under Dr. Peter Ward and interactions with stellar surgical pathologists such as Dr. Henry Appelman and later Dr. Sharon Weiss made it an inspiring place to work. Dr. Lloyd established the immunohistochemistry laboratory at Michigan and it rapidly became an essential part of diagnostic pathology.

Dr. Lloyd presented his first paper at the USCAP in 1982 and has had yearly presentation at the USCAP Annual Meetings since that time. An enthusiastic supporter of short courses, he has presented various USCAP short courses over the past fourteen years.

After moving to the Mayo Clinic in 1993, he continued his practice as a Surgical Pathologist. He also runs an active research laboratory in Experimental Pathology with training of undergraduate and postdoctoral students from all over the world. At Mayo, Dr. Lloyd established a diagnostic chromogenic in situ hybridization laboratory which does a few thousand tests for patient diagnosis yearly. He recently established a molecular diagnostic laboratory using mainly paraffin sections for RT-PCR and other molecular tests. He continues to interact daily with a dynamic group of outstanding pathologists in all specialties at Mayo.

Dr. Lloyd has been a recipient of various awards and honors over the years including the first Endowed Warthin-Weller Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan and the Vernon F. and Earline D. Dale Professor at the Mayo Clinic. He was the recipient of the first Arthur Purdy Stout Award in 1985. He has served on NIH Study Sections for the past fifteen years and his research laboratory has had continuous NIH grant funding for the past twenty years.

Dr. Lloyd has had a very productive Academic Career, having published more than three hundred scientific articles. He has written or edited seven books including the first Atlas of NonTumor Pathology on Endocrine Diseases. He serves on the editorial board of more than ten pathology and medical journals.

His academic career has been closely aligned with the USCAP for over two decades. The intellectual stimulation and camaraderie experienced at the Annual Meetings has been unparalleled. It has been stimulating to see progress in diagnostic pathology moving from immunohistochemical to molecular analyses in order to establish the most precise diagnoses for each patient. It has also been inspiring to see so many talented and enthusiastic young people participating in the Annual Meeting.