Dear Colleagues,

We hope that you are staying safe and healthy during this unprecedented time. As the crisis continues we would like to thank all our members for your relentless work. Your efforts are appreciated for the care you deliver each day.

Same as other organizations, ISDP has faced significant challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and many of you might have wondered about the future of the society. As the outbreak of COVID-19 has been unfolding worldwide, the ISDP Leadership has been closely monitoring its impact on our society and membership. As you know, at the beginning of March, and after carefully weighing the emerging facts as well as the duties to our members, the ISDP made the difficult, but necessary decision to cancel the 23rd Joint Meeting in Denver and roll over the agenda to the meeting scheduled for March 17-18, 2021 in San Francisco, California.  For similar reasons, the XLI Symposium in Cape Town was postponed until 2021.

For the last 3 months society leadership and planning committee members have been working diligently on developing a plan to ensure that our society can thrive, fulfill our mission and serve the membership during these challenging and uncertain times. Following are some of the projects:

·        First fully virtual meeting organized by the ISDP on Halloween to test several platforms prior to the upcoming meetings. We can report that the utilized platform (Zoom and Path-Presenter) provided good support for the meeting. The lessons learned will be applied to the organization of the 2021 Joint Meeting

·        On-line lectures: On the same venue, the ISDP is planning to post online recorded conferences from the Joint Meeting that will be available for members. Other educational online content is also being evaluated.

·        Virtual slide library: As you are probably aware, the ISDP had already planned for the Self-Assessment course to go digital this year and started working on a digital slide library. We plan to provide to all our membership in the near future a collection of interesting and educative cases which will become available to the society membership.

These are some of the exciting projects that the society is working on. Perhaps there is also a silver lining to this unfortunate crisis. We are facing unprecedented challenges that have determined our society to look into innovative strategies that will likely benefit our members. Fortunately, ISDP is financially strong and in a good position to weather these unpredictable times. We are confident that we will be able to come out better and stronger as a society after this crisis and continue to deliver the knowledge, research and expert insight that the members expect from us.

Warmest Regards,

Dr. Victor G. Prieto, President

Dr. Anjela Galan, Vice President

Dr. Joyce Lee, Secretary/Treasurer 

International Society of Dermatopathology
P.O. Box 2444
Fredericksburg, TX 78624-2444
Phone: 650-729-1234
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.intsocdermpath.org