2018 CAP Lifetime Achievement Award

Established in 2006, the CAP Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes and honors a CAP member who has made a broad and positive impact on the pathology profession through contributions to one or more areas of the organization over an extended period of time.

The College of American Pathologists presents M. Qasim Ansari, MD, FCAP, with a CAP Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions and service to the CAP’s Laboratory Improvement Programs over the years. Dr. Ansari is a past chair of the Diagnostic Immunology Resource Committee (DIRC) and now serves as its advisor. He is also a member of the Council on Scientific Affairs and co-chair of the Center’s guideline project Laboratory Work-up and Initial Diagnosis of Monoclonal Gammopathies.

Through his leadership as a champion of patient safety, he led the DIRC as it investigated discrepant proficiency testing (PT) results from 2011 to 2014, comparing multiplex bead method results to other methods for the detection of antinuclear antibodies (ANA), double-stranded DNA, and Smith (Sm) and nuclear ribonucleoproteins (RNP).

Dr. Ansari also is a champion of education for pathologists and medical technologists. He encouraged and participated in a study to determine laboratory practices for the testing and reporting of ANA, the results of which will be used as base-line data for a Center project under consideration. Furthermore, Dr. Ansari collaborated with the Quality Practices Committee to write a test utilization module for clinicians and pathologists. On behalf of medical technologists, Dr. Ansari has encouraged DIRC members to provide continuing education (CE) activities with diagnostic immunology PT. Since 2012, CE activities have been offered at least once each year, with Dr. Ansari authoring or co-authoring five of the activities.

Dr. Ansari serves as a professor of pathology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University and as chief of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Louis Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Center, both located in Cleveland.

The College of American Pathologists presents George G. Birdsong, MD, FCAP, with a CAP Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contributions and service within the Council on Scientific Affairs over the years.

Dr. Birdsong has greatly impacted the CAP and the everyday lives of pathologists. His leadership as the former chair of the Pathology Electronic Reporting (PERT) Committee paved the way for pathologists to report on their cancer cases within their laboratory information systems. He has also greatly improved and grown the use and value of CAP electronic Cancer Checklists (eCC) by pathologists through his validation and review work with the Cancer Protocol Review Panel. He has been involved in a multitude of other CAP committees over the years. These include the Informatics (formerly DIHIT) Committee, the Clinical Informatics Steering Committee, and the Cytopathology Committee. In addition, Dr. Birdsong has served as a liaison and CAP spokesperson of note to the International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR), the IHE-iPaLM group working with SNOMED International, and the in-house PHC Pre-analytics for Precision Medicine Project Team. He is also a member of the House of Delegates, serves on the gynecologic Cancer Protocols review panel, and has worked on CAP advisory groups, ad-hoc committees, and internal boards throughout the years.

Dr. Birdsong has a long record of service to the profession of pathology through involvement in activities outside the CAP. He contributed his considerable experience to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and played a significant part in crafting scientific and technical advice and guidance to the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Birdsong also participated as a work group member of the Gynecologic Cytopathology Quality Consensus Conference to develop an inventory of current practices in gynecologic cytology laboratories in order to standardize procedures for quality improvement.

Dr. Birdsong is a professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and director of anatomic pathology at Grady Health System, both in Atlanta.

The College of American Pathologists honors Katherine A. Galagan, MD, FCAP, with a CAP Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her extraordinary and positive impact on pathology throughout her career.

Dr. Galagan has continually demonstrated strong organizational and leadership skills on CAP committees and in her own pathology group at Virginia Mason Medical Center. She had the deep respect of the medical staff and her colleagues and managed the group through very challenging times.

Over the years, Dr. Galagan has served in various roles in three CAP councils, including as vice chair of the Checklist Committee in the Council on Accreditation, as a member and chair of the Hematology and Clinical Microscopy Resource Committee in the Council on Scientific Affairs, and as chair of the Publications Committee in the Council on Education.

For the Checklist Committee, she worked extensively on many projects to upgrade and improve the various accreditation checklists, including the team leader, hematology, urinalysis, and flow cytometry checklists. In addition, Dr. Galagan served as a CAP inspector for more than 28 years.

As member and chair of the Hematology and Clinical Microscopy Resource Committee, she supported the proficiency testing (PT) programs and provided expertise on questions related to accreditation checklists. She also contributed photomicrographs, case studies, and samples for PT challenges and authored many PT data summaries along with a discussion of the disease entities represented.

During her time as chair of the Publications Committee, Dr. Galagan oversaw the publication of 13 CAP Press titles, with an additional four released in early 2018. She also coedited The Healing Art of Pathology with Marilyn M. Bui, MD, PhD, FCAP, and was one of the authors of both editions of the Color Atlas of Hematology, Color Atlas of Body Fluids, and Color Atlas of the Urinary Sediment, in collaboration with Eric F. Glassy, MD, FCAP, and others.

Dr. Galagan formerly served as director of clinical chemistry, director of blood bank, chief of pathology, and director of clinical laboratories at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle.

The College of American Pathologists presents John H. Sinard, MD, PhD, FCAP, with a CAP Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his continued leadership contributions to the CAP that span a number of years across multiple areas and committees/councils.

Currently, Dr. Sinard is vice chair of the Informatics Committee, as well as a member of the Council on Education, Council on Scientific Affairs, Web Engagement Steering Committee, and the Value-Based Care Strategy Steering Committee. Over the years, he has served in various roles on the Autopsy Committee, the Ad Hoc Committee on Digital Pathology, the Center Digital Pathology Validation Principles Workgroup, the Clinical Informatics Steering Committee, and the Diagnostic Intelligence and Health Information Technology Committee. In addition, he is a member of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology and the secretary on its board of directors. Dr. Sinard recently completed his tenure on the Centers for Disease Control’s Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee in 2017.

With a passion for education, he has taught several courses at the CAP’s annual meetings. Dr. Sinard was instrumental in incorporating informatics elements into several past annual meeting presentations.

Dr. Sinard also has been an active member of the original collaborative working group (the CAP, Association of Pathology Chairs, Association for Pathology Informatics) formed to create a free informatics curriculum for pathology residency programs. This competency-based effort resulted in a novel curriculum framework, Pathology Informatics Essentials for Residents (PIER), which was mapped to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education milestones for informatics. He helped to identify how the curriculum could be delivered, resulting in the PIER Toolkit, an interactive pdf document that program directors can use to plan, schedule, and implement informatics training.

He has established himself as a leader in the pathology informatics field and is the author of the book Practical Pathology Informatics—Demystifying Informatics for the Practicing Anatomic Pathologist. He is the author/co-author of numerous publications, including the lead author of Empowering Pathology in the Era of the Electronic Health Record, part of a series of informatics-related articles in the March 2015 special section in Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine.

Dr. Sinard serves as vice chair and director of anatomic pathology at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

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