Looking Back and Forward

Dear members and friends of the working group,

I hope you had a wonderful X-Mas season and wish you and your families all the best for 2020. I take the opportunity to update you about past and ongoing activities of our WG and two important upcoming events.

We had a very successful meeting in Nice in September 2019 with interesting and well attended nephropathology sessions. We also had an extensive and interesting business meeting where we addressed ongoing and upcoming activities (link to slides).
We particularly discussed how we could optimize the relationship and collaboration with the Renal Pathology Society (RPS) and voted for the suggestions of the RPS that the current chair of our WG is invited to the two annual meetings of the BOD/BOA of the RPS as well as to the monthly telephone calls. This is indeed a major breakthrough in our mutual relation and I would like to particularly thank Laura Barisoni and Michael Mengel, the past and present president of the RPS as well as Renate Kain, the chair of the international committee of the RPS.

We also had a half day meeting of the Kidney Biopsy Coding Project (KBC) under the leadership of Amélie Dendooven and Sabine Leh and realized with great fun the major progress of this main project of our WG. This of course will be another joint project between our WG and the RPS, which is very much interested in the progress of the coding project.
The RPS itself runs a group that is led by Mark Haas, which deals with synchronization of definitions both on the light microscopical as well as on the electron microscopical level. In addition, there are some groups interested in definitions of TMA that also collaborate under the roof of the RPS.

Our new Working Group website, created by Helmut Hopfer, was launched in November and has already attracted a lot of traffic. Thank you very much Helmut!

This year, there will be two major nephropathology meetings to which I would like to invite you:

1. The 4^th International Renal Pathology Conference in Warsaw, a joint meeting of the RPS and our WG. This 2 ½ day meeting is unique and will not return to Europe within the next 10 years. Our local organizer and host Agnieszka Perkowska-Ptasinska certainly derived much credit and many thanks for putting together such a great program.
2. The annual meeting of the ESP in Glasgow where our WG is most happy to have an extended program thanks to the great work of Ian Roberts who is on the program committee.
   We will have a full Sunday and Monday program (30.and 31.08. 2020) with new formats that we hope will be liked by you.

So please make sure to mark these two major events in your calender!

Best wishes
Kerstin Amann