Dear API Members, Colleagues, Trainees, Partners, and Friends,

It is a profound honor to serve as President of the Association for Pathology Informatics. I am grateful for the confidence our community has placed in me, and even more grateful to the many mentors, colleagues, volunteers, and friends who have shaped my path in this field.

I begin my term with particular appreciation for our Past President, Lisa-Jean Clifford, whose leadership has strengthened API and positioned us for what comes next. I am equally thankful to our Governing Council, committee leaders and volunteers, educators, staff, institutional and industry partners, and the generations of pathology informaticians who built this Association. API has always been more than a professional society. It is a community of people willing to tackle the difficult problems that arise where medicine, information, technology, and people meet.

My own fascination with that intersection began long before I knew the words pathology informatics. 

Growing up in Ukraine and reading Isaac Asimov's science fiction, I remember wondering whether I had been born too late, and whether perhaps all the important inventions had already been made, while the truly exciting possibilities, like antigravity and perpetual motion, had been inconveniently outlawed by nature. My father, an electronics engineer, redirected some of my imagination toward mathematics and circuitry. My grandmother, a physician, taught me about medicine and public health. My mother's work in a clinical laboratory introduced me to the enormous amount of medicine that happens behind the scenes. And when she nearly died after receiving a mismatched blood transfusion, the consequences of failures in identification, information, decision-making, and workflow became profoundly personal.

The child who worried that all the important innovations had already happened eventually found a career in a field devoted to helping guide what comes next.

API played an essential role in that journey. I joined the Association as a medical student in 2004. An API Travel Award helped bring me to the annual meeting as a trainee, introducing me to a community in which physicians, scientists, engineers, and technologists were already thinking about medicine in ways that felt like the future. In 2008, Dr. John Gilbertson invited me to become the inaugural Pathology Informatics Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. That opportunity set me on a path of learning from extraordinary mentors and colleagues at institutions across the United States, a country that had welcomed my family when I arrived here as an immigrant child.

My family has remained central to that journey. My wife has supported both my career and my persistent enthusiasm for informatics through moves across the country, while her own career in radiology gave me a close view of how profoundly a medical specialty can change when digital workflows become part of everyday clinical practice.

Today, we find ourselves at another remarkable transition as laboratories face persistent workforce shortages and reimbursement pressures while rising specimen volumes and increasingly advanced testing such as comprehensive genomic profiling add to the quantity and complexity of the information we must manage.

Artificial intelligence, digital pathology, increasingly interconnected clinical systems, and new forms of computational medicine are advancing at a pace that would have seemed like science fiction not long ago. Our responsibility as pathology informaticians is to determine when technology is ready to earn a place in patient care. 

An algorithm can perform impressively and still fail in clinical practice. A system can be technically sophisticated and still create a cumbersome or error-prone workflow. A model validated at one institution can behave differently when the patients, instruments, interfaces, prevalence, or clinical environment change. And a technology that improves efficiency without preserving quality, safety, consistency, transparency, access, and accountability may not represent progress at all,

I believe that defining standards for validation, performing validation rigorously, and continuously monitoring clinical performance will be among the defining responsibilities of our field. Pathology informaticians are uniquely positioned to connect technological capability with clinical reality: to ask not only Can we build it? but Does it work here? For whom? Under what conditions? How will we know when it stops working? And does it actually improve patient care?

This is where I believe API and its members must lead. We should be deliberate in judgment, generous in teaching, and thoughtful about the safeguards we build around powerful technologies. We should advance practical frameworks for evaluating and monitoring AI and other emerging technologies throughout their clinical life cycle. We should champion interoperability and standards so that information can move reliably between instruments, laboratories, health systems, researchers, and patients. We should continue advocating for the informatics expertise and resources that modern laboratories require to meet increasing clinical, operational, and financial demands. We should bring the laboratory's perspective into broader conversations about health information technology, AI governance, regulation, and clinical decision-making.

Just as importantly, we must continue educating the people who will do this work. API is the professional home for the trainee discovering informatics for the first time, the practicing pathologist trying to improve a laboratory workflow, the scientist developing a new method, the experienced informatician willing to mentor the next generation, and the engineer or industry partner trying to understand what clinicians truly need. Our meetings, workshops, educational programs, publications, advocacy, mentorship, and global outreach make this community easier to join and more valuable throughout a career.

To the students, residents, fellows, and early-career colleagues reading this: please do not wait until you believe you know enough to contribute. Few of us ever feel completely ready.

Ask the question. Build the prototype. Submit the abstract. Publish the work. Apply for the position. Volunteer for the committee. Introduce yourself to the person whose work you admire. Find mentors and, sooner than you think, become one. Learn from the experienced members of API, and learn from the increasingly intelligent machines around you. Maintain enough healthy skepticism to validate the output of both.

Our industry partners also have an essential place in this work. Transforming medicine requires more than good ideas: it requires engineering, investment, implementation, iteration, and an honest understanding of what happens when technology encounters the complexity of a real clinical environment. API is at its best when laboratorians, pathologists, researchers, developers, healthcare leaders, regulators, and technology companies can engage one another while challenging assumptions, sharing expertise, and building solutions whose value can ultimately be demonstrated in patient care.

And our community must increasingly transcend geography. Talent and good ideas are distributed far more widely than resources and opportunities. API will continue lowering barriers to participation, developing international relationships, and creating pathways through which people around the world can learn from one another, advance telepathology, and contribute to the future of pathology informatics.

When I look at my children, I often wonder what medicine will look like when they are my age. I cannot predict which technologies will dominate their lives or what we will someday regard as routine. I am confident, however, that technology will not relieve medicine of its fundamental obligations: rigor, sound judgment, humility, accountability, and compassion. Our responsibility is to make sure that innovation strengthens those values instead of displacing them.

The challenge before pathology informatics is therefore not simply to predict the future. It is to help build it: to identify the right technologies, validate them rigorously, integrate them thoughtfully, measure their effects honestly, and continually improve them so that the right information reaches the right person at the right time. No single career will finish this work, but each of us has a responsibility to carry it forward.

Some moments will require moving faster. Some will entail insisting on more evidence. Wisdom will lie in knowing the difference.

More than twenty years after first finding this community as a medical student, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to serve it as President. I invite you, whether you have been part of API for decades or have only just discovered pathology informatics, to bring your ideas, your questions, your expertise, and your curiosity.

There has never been a more interesting time to help shape the future of our field.

And, fortunately, there are still plenty of important things left to invent.