| Comments: | At the IAP meeting in 1995, Dr. Megha Joshi with the support of Drs. YogeshwarDayal, Bhagwan and ShardaSabnis founded the Association of Indian Pathologists in North America (AIPNA). It was founded out of 'Love for India'. AIPNA members love India beyond their family and friends. We love our colleagues in India and their patients. We strive to give back voluntarily to those patients, who were instrumental in our foundational medical education. Prior to this in 1983, Dr. Vijay Joshi had initiated an informal group of Indian-American Pathologists (Friends of India).
In 1996 just two years after the founding of AIPNA, its Executive Committee awarded Dean Nagalotimath and Dr.Vijay Joshi with the sponsorship of the annual International CME Course in Surgical Pathology and Cytology. Almost concurrently founded, the Indian College of Pathologists (ICP) became the co-sponsors of that course. Sponsorship from AIPNA and ICP made it feasible for faculty members of AIPNA and Indian coordinators to organize the course at their medical colleges. The course thus became a regular annual event with the course in 2020 to be the 25th consecutive one. After Dr. Vijay Joshi’s retirement as the CME coordinator in 2001, Dr.Venkat Challa became the CME Coordinator, followed by Dr. Ashraf Khan in 2007, and Drs. Nirag Jhala and Srinivas Mandavilli in 2012. With the success of ICP-AIPNA sponsored annual CME Course in Surgical Pathology, subspecialty courses were initiated by AIPNA in India. These include courses in Renal Pathology organized by Dr. Surya Seshan (the Renal Pathologists in India were inspired by AIPNA to found the Renal Pathology Society of India), Molecular Pathology (Drs. PritishBhattcharya and Priti Lal), Gynecologic Pathology (Dr. Mandavilli) and the annual Pediatric Pathology meeting (Drs. Ranganathan, Anita Gupta and Vijay Joshi). Seminars at the ASCP (Dr. Nirag Jhala) and CAP (Drs. Megha Joshi and Anil Prasad) have also been successfully initiated. There are also meetings at the IAP. For all AIPNA activities in India, invaluable support has been given by ICP founders and office bearers (Drs.C.I. Jhala , Balaraman Nair, Lanjewar and others) along with many resourceful partners in India (Drs. Gupta, Pramila Bajaj , A K Banerjee, Vineeta Malhotra, Avinash Pradhan, B R Das, RadhikaSrinivasan, Usha Kini, SuraviMohanty, NanditaKakkar, and others).
AIPNA newsletters (editors Drs.Viju Padmanabhan, ParulBhargava, Romil Saxena, ShardaSabnis and Bhuvaneshwari Krishnan in the past and in recent years Drs. Shivayogi Bhusnurmath and Bharti Bhusnurmath) have served as critical communication tools between AIPNA and its members. AIPNA patrons Drs.Vinay Kumar and Vijay Joshi continue to provide wisdom and guidance. All these members have given their organizational skills, networking efforts and voluntary spirit to AIPNA and have worked hard for its success. AIPNA shall not sit on its laurels -- we have to continue to expand AIPNA and continue to bring in newer Indian-American Pathologists into the fold of AIPNA. |
