Letter from the President

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am deeply honored and grateful for your confidence and trust in me to serve as the President of the Cancer Genomics Consortium (CGC) for the 2024-2025 term. I feel very privileged and humbled to be elected by my colleagues to undertake such a role, and will work hard to ensure that the CGC continues the mission of educating and promoting best practices in clinical cancer genomics.

One striking feature of the CGC community is the extreme dedication of and efforts by our members in the pursuit of our goals. I am always in awe of and humbled by the many selfless hours they devote to our organization, whether the task or initiative be small or large. As President-Elect, I experienced first-hand the cohesive and unified contributions of the Program Committee and look forward in the coming year to gain an even better understanding of the other varied contributions made by our members. So, I want to sincerely thank you all for your continuing efforts and look forward to what we can accomplish in the future.

In the upcoming year, we look forward to additional webinars organized by the Education Committee as those in 2023-2024 have been extremely well attended with coverage of highly relevant topics. Kudos to the contributors of the new Geneticist Toolkit in providing practice resources for laboratorians with helpful tip sheets of how and when to use these resources. Our working groups have been very busy and we look forward to a number of CGC publications in 2025 for new disease groups or critical updates and in collaboration with other professional organizations. Through the CCGA collaboration with the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer, our global recognition continues to grow and our international outreach efforts have attracted CGC members and meeting/webinar attendees in 25 countries across six continents. The Early Career Initiative Committee will continue to engage those early in their careers on multiple fronts with the highly successful virtual Coffee Chats with Mentors and the social at the Annual Meeting. The Membership and Communications Committees are constantly exploring novel means to expand our network of clinical genomicists and social media footprint because it is through the influx of new expertise, ideas, and energy that we can continue to fulfill our goals. Importantly, the Development Committee is launching the CGC Corporate Council as an exciting new initiative to further ensure sustainability of the CGC. We will of course face some challenges in the upcoming year especially as each of us undertake and implement the transitions required by the FDA in the regulation of laboratory developed tests. Through our educational activities, we hope we can help support our CGC colleagues during the process.

I would like to warmly welcome Angela Lager as a new member of the Board of Directors and Wesley Goar as a new Junior Board Member. I look forward to working with all of you. We will certainly miss Obi Griffith as he rotates out of his Past-President role on the Board but will remain as a seminal contributor in several initiatives. His contributions to the CGC were numerous and he brought a new dimension to the CGC constituency that has grown our community. With sincerity we thank Xinjie Xu as the outgoing Treasurer and Fady Mikhail as the outgoing Secretary for their long and dedicated efforts – your commitment to the CGC in these roles has been outstanding. Celeste Eno and Cate Pascal are stepping into their new positions as Treasurer and Secretary respectively and we very much look forward to working with you. We, at the CGC, have benefited hugely from the efforts and wisdom of Rashmi Kanagal-Shamanna as the President for 2023-2024, and she will continue to guide us in the upcoming year as Past-President. Congratulations and good luck to Fady Mikhail who, as the President-Elect and 2025 Annual Meeting Program Chair, has already started organizing the 16th Annual CGC Meeting in August 2025 in Houston, Texas. I hope you will all be able to join us at the meeting and experience the exciting program that Fady and the Program Committee are building. Lastly, I must thank the continuing contributions of our advisors: Marilyn Li, Brynn Levy, and Anwar Iqbal.

I have always found the CGC to truly be a “community” where our characteristic in common is our dedication to ensure best practices in clinical genomics for the patients we serve, and we achieve this goal as a unified body (the CGC) with a sense of fellowship and respect. I look forward to contributing to the next phase of growth and development of the CGC.
 

Thank you for your trust,