By Ted E. Schutzbank, PhD Chair, Publications Committee and Secretary-Treasurer e-mail: ted.schutzbank@covance.com

This is my first report since becoming Chair of the Publications Committee, taking over from Terry Dunn.  My sincere thanks goes to Terry for his past service as Committee Chair, and for all the help and advice he has given me over the past few months.  Two Committee members rotated off this year.  Karen Kaul and Shuji Ogino, both stepped down from their roles as Editor-in-Chief of JMD and CHAMP Moderator, respectively.  A warm thanks to you for your excellent service to the Publications Committee.  Karen has been succeeded by Timothy O’Leary, and Shuji has handed over the reigns of CHAMP to Quilu Pan.  Quilu served as Associate Moderator of CHAMP, and will now be assisted by Bernadette Wildemore, our new Associate Moderator.  Congratulations to Tim, Quilu, and Bernadette.

Maintaining the AMP Web Library remains in the capable hands of Kathleen Murphy, who will be updating the Web Library with the presentations from the 2009 AMP Meeting.  The materials posted to the Web Library are intended to be used for the education of our members and their students, and cover a broad and eclectic array of subjects.  I encourage all of you who have presentations to submit your material for inclusion in the Web Library to Kathleen at kmurphy4@jhmi.edu.

At the 2009 Publications Committee meeting in Orlando this past November, Mary Lowery Nordberg, the AMP Web Editorial Board Editor, presented an update on the redesign of the AMP webpage by the members of the Web Editorial Board.  Great progress has been made in this endeavor, especially in the new aesthetic look and its functionality.  This has been an enormous effort, and kudos are due to Mary and her team for the excellent progress made.  A major part of the new webpage design is the overhaul of the AMP Test Directory, by Test Directory Editor, Alexis Carter.  Extensive updates were made by Alexis to the Infectious Diseases, Solid Tumors and Hematopathology Test Directories to clean-up old and inconsistent data. Reformatting of the “back-end” of the test directory database is underway which will enable easier addition of new tests and new and improved search features.

The Publications Committee is soliciting articles for publication in the “Molecular Edge” section of the magazine Advance for Administrators of the Laboratory.  I thank all of you who have submitted articles in the past.  The latest submission, Biomarkers Guiding Drug Eligibility by Frederico Monzon will be published in an upcoming issue.  I am asking all of you to please consider submitting topics for publication in Advance.  This is a very useful vehicle for promoting molecular diagnostics and molecular pathology to all clinical laboratory professionals.  Please contact me. 

We have received very positive feedback on the electronic version of the AMP Newsletter.  The first electronic version was issued in February 2009. Going “paperless” immensely reduces formatting time for the editors, saves printing and mailing costs, and is considerably more environmentally friendly than mailing out all that paper. Teresita Cuyegkeng Redondo and Marlene Sabbath-Solitare, the Co-Editors of the Newsletter, continue to discuss ways to modify the next issues of the Newsletter.  The inclusion of special feature articles is one idea currently being considered.  I encourage all of you to submit your ideas to Terry (tredondo@sbhcs.com) and Marlene (msabbath@sbhcs.com).  Many thanks are due to Terry and Marlene for putting this Newsletter together.  Chasing after all of us to get our articles in on time is a thankless task and is comparable to herding cats.  Their efforts are greatly appreciated.

I am looking forward to working with all of the members of the Publications Committee over the next two years.  I consider myself fortunate to be able to work with such an incredibly talented group of professionals. We have important work ahead of us, and I know it is going to be both fun and rewarding.