President’s Column 

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By Guadalupe Garcia-Tsao, MD, AASLD President

I am proud, honored and excited to begin my year as AASLD President in January of 2012. Serving on the AASLD Governing Board is a little like a fellowship in leadership. It has been a privilege to work with Jake Liang, our immediate Past-President, along with the others whose leadership styles and perspectives have helped me as I prepare for this year.

AASLD will continue providing top-notch programs that we've all come to expect -- our meetings, publications, practice guidelines, etc. The world, however, is forever changing, and it is the Board's role to guide AASLD through the changes and to continue to place it as a leader in the field of liver research and education.

In 2012, AASLD will focus on educational activities and the electronic delivery of education not only to hepatologists but also to other health care providers interested in the practice and research of liver diseases. The LiverLearning portal is already up and running, and I invite you to visit it. It is a user-friendly site that currently contains 33 presentations from The Liver Meeting® along with access to our practice guidelines.

Clinical Liver Disease (CLD) is our newest online-only publication and is poised to launch in February of this year under the editorship of Dr. Michael Lucey. It will be a multi-media forum that will provide continuing medical education and peer-reviewed content to those who need the latest information to help practitioners in the diagnosis and management of patients with liver disease.

AASLD is certainly keeping an eye on the future as it moves forward with other multimedia and web-based products such as Talks on the Go and ePosters, which I encourage you to visit, but we are also moving forward to increase the number of people committed to hepatology. Like many of us who became interested in hepatology as medical students and many others who did so as residents, we will be focusing on fostering one-on-one interactions between fledgling and established hepatologists. With this purpose in mind, AASLD has changed its committee structure to reflect a new emphasis on mentorship. The Membership Committee is now the Membership and Mentorship Committee. In addition to overseeing the membership approval process, it will also focus on recruitment of medical students and residents via mentoring opportunities. 

That last item is of particular importance to me and the rest of the Governing Board. AASLD has committed $500,000 over the next five years to this mentoring program. Dr. Steven Herrine, who so ably led the Training and Workforce Committee, has agreed to serve as chair of this newly focused committee.

AASLD will continue to support and develop the career of young investigators already committed to the study of liver diseases in the form of research awards and Single Topic Conferences. The Board has made a further commitment of $1,180,000 to support career development awards, it has increased the funding of the Clinical Single Topic Conference by $500,000 (bringing it to $1,250,000) towards making it self-sustainable, and it has committed $1,500,000 to a new Emerging Trends Conference that, while still following the general format of Single Topic Conferences, can be planned and performed expeditiously to respond in a timely manner to "hot" topics important to the discipline and the Society.

These are large amounts of money, but they clearly reflect our Association's priorities, and the Governing Board is proud to use the resources that we have all worked hard to accrue in order to advance AASLD’s mission. 

I am thrilled at the prospect of continuing to work with talented and thoughtful individuals with the common goal of ultimately improving the care of patients with liver disease.