The RPS Business meeting was held during the ASN annual meeting in San Diego, CA, on Thursday March 15th2006, at 8.45-9.45 PM at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Forty six members were in attendance. The meeting was called in order by President Jan Bruijn.

1. President’s report: Dr. Bruijn discussed issues addressed at the Board of Directors meeting and called upon the committee chairs to briefly present their reports.
2. Dr Seshan updated the RPS members on the progress of the international committee and proposed a survey be contacted by e-mail to investigate the needs of nephrologists around the world that may help her committee’s functions. Dr. Jennette suggested interacting with COMGAN and discussing further with Dr. Fogo.
3. The nominating and awards committee reported on the recent awards to Dr. Robert McCluskey and the Pirani awards for 2006 to Rob de Lind van Wijngaarden, Idske Kremer Hovinga and Marije Koopmans. Dr. Nickeleit handed the awards to the winners from the Netherlands.
4. Financial committee chair Dr. Luan Truong presented the current RPS balance standing at $40,065.86, including funds in the Pirani travel awards (at $7,250 prior to the checks for the current winners). He suggested the Pirani award to be a permanent RPS feature sustained by member contributions.
5. KUFA will fund 2 grants in 2007 at 5,000 each. Applications will be reviewed by the KUFA grants committee composed of Drs Cook, Truong and Seshan. Deadline for submission is January 15th, 2007. Decisions will be made by end of February 2007. Final report is due end of February 2008.
6. The next RPS-KUFA satellite meeting was decided to take place in Istanbul, the venue for the European Pathology society in 2007. Dr Seshan believes that KUFA will support this meeting.
7. Education committee reported that Dr. Laura Barisoni will chair the program committee for the RPS satellite meeting in Istanbul.
8. Questions on renal pathology for the American Board of Pathology were submitted to Fred Silva by dr. Seshan.
9. Dr. Meleg-Smith chair of communications committee asked chairs and committee members who have not done so, to fill in the manual of operations.
10. From the membership committee, Dr. Picken, chair reported that the RPS has 371 members currently, 19 new regular members, 10 junior members, 2 emeritus.  From N. America there are 265 members (US: 242), S. America –8
    Europe – 60 (UK: 16, Holland: 15), Australia – 3, 1, Asia –33 (India: 12).
11. Cynthia Nast commented on the program for ASN 2007. The RPS has sent its recommendations for the sponsored symposia. For 2007, there will be no pathologist on the committee. Sharon Adler will represent RPS. Dr. Ronald Falk, newly elected ASN councilor will try to add a pathologist to the committee. Mark Haas, RPS vice president will follow up on this issue.
12. Research committee chair, Dr. Terry Cook commented that there have not yet been many replies to the ISN/RPS lupus classification which was recently circulated to RPS members. Other projects, such as classification of diabetic nephropathy and follow up biopsies in lupus are ongoing. Arthur Cohen suggested that some of these study discussions may be facilitated by an internal chat room.
13. Steve Bonsib announced that the 30 year celebration of the renal pathology club will take place at the USCAP meeting in San Diego, March 2007. He plans to form a committee to prepare the program to honor the founders of the society.
14. New business: Bob Colvin proposed that the RPS membership may be interested in getting involved in multicenter trials correlating Genomic findings to renal biopsy. In his experience so far, he identifies many problems such as slides not available at various sites and description of findings not uniform.  He proposed developing scoring sheets to distribute to the membership aiming to uniformity of renal biopsy reporting. A dictionary of terms may be useful. Several members expressed an interest in this proposal.

The meeting was adjourned at 9.45pm