Dear SVIN Members,

It is a great honor and pleasure to serve as your 2024-2025 President. I am humbled to take on this role as the first woman President in succession to our founders and leaders who created our Society in 2006. I have been a member of the SVIN since it began in 2007. In this journey, I launched several initiatives with the support of our past presidents and board leaders, including the SVIN pilot research grant, the Women in Vascular Neurology and Neurointervention section, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee inspired by the George Floyd incident and the inaugural late window SVIN guideline with Drs. Alicia Castonguay and Osama Zaidat. I have had the privilege to interact with SVIN members through the global COVID SVIN research collaborations, which was a grass-roots effort with Drs. Raul Nogueira and James Siegler to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stroke, stroke emergency preparedness, cerebral venous disease, and subarachnoid hemorrhage care worldwide.

In this address, I highlight our last few months and review what to expect for the coming year.

SVIN Annual Meeting 2023

Year after year, our SVIN annual meeting has seen remarkable growth. The 2023 SVIN Annual Meeting was an incredible success with a record breaking 1,226 attendees. We extend a big thank you to our members, colleagues, faculty, industry partners and sponsors who attended our highly successful SVIN2023 annual meeting in Miami. I extend special thanks to Dr. Fawaz Al-Mufti and Dr. Alexandra Czap, chair and vice-chair of our annual meeting, who did an outstanding job bringing together our colleagues across our multidisciplinary specialty, including vascular neurologists, interventional neurologists, interventional neuroradiologists, and cerebrovascular neurosurgeons to deliver a cutting edge, high yield program, whose theme was on SVINnovation. We also extend special thanks to speakers, collaborating societies including our WFITN, AHA, LATAM, Europe colleagues and industry sponsors. SVIN introduced its new mascot, Willow. I extend a shout-out to Drs. Shadi Yaghi and Yasmin Aziz for initiating our first SVIN Squid games, another highlight of the meeting.

While our number of attendees at our annual meeting were record-breaking, it is the quality of our meeting content and programming that matter most to us. I am pleased to share with you that the feedback we received after the annual meeting was stellar. Your suggestions and criticisms are taken very seriously, and we strive to improve year after year. To claim your CME please go to the link here.

Please save the date for the annual meeting in San Diego, November 20-22, 2024, which will be chaired by Dr. Alexandra Czap. Having had some conversations with Dr. Czap, I am very excited about the developing program content for this meeting. We are eager to highlight your best science.

Education

Under the leadership of Drs. Robin Novakovic, Dr. Kaiz Asif and Dr. Amanda Jagolino-Cole, we have made terrific strides in our educational mission, with the Virtual Stroke Academy (VSA) and SVIN University webinar series. Herein, we strive to provide content on what can improve your practice as trainee, stroke or neurointerventional clinician. In parallel, under the leadership of Dr. Ameer Hassan, we have initiated our first SVIN University bootcamp geared to our industry and engineering partners, to engage in close exchange of clinician versus industry perspective, with the overarching goal of furthering our educational mission.

Mission Thrombectomy

The past year has been a terrific year for Mission Thrombectomy, an initiative that was begun by Dr. Dileep Yavagal, to expand access to mechanical thrombectomy worldwide. The MT-GLASS study, published in Circulation last year, was an eye-opener, revealing disparities in access to thrombectomy between countries and by income level. Importantly, we are proud to share that Mission Thrombectomy has gained special consultative status with the United Nations, where we will continue our efforts to advocate for our patients. This is a special achievement for SVIN, as it will enable us to continue to achieve our goals. Special thanks to Drs. Dileep Yavagal, Fawaz Al-Mufti, Victor Urrutia who have worked very hard to enable this privilege for SVIN.

From a governance standpoint, Mission Thrombectomy will be moving towards being a committee of the SVIN, with rotation of leadership. We are incredibly grateful to Dr. Dileep Yavagal for having initiated, developed, and grown this global initiative since its inception in 2016. The Mission Thrombectomy leadership will rotate mid-2024 to Dr. Fawaz Al-Mufti, who has played an important role as core executive committee. We are also very happy to welcome Dr. Fred Echols as our new Executive Director of Mission Thrombectomy; we are confident with his wealth of experience as a former Obama fellow, Mission Thrombectomy will continue to thrive.

S:VIN Journal

Over 2 years after launch, we are beaming with pride on the continued success of the S:VIN Journal, with over 400 article submissions in 2023. Our gratitude to Dr. Ashutosh Jadhav and the S:VIN Editors, Editorial Board and Digital Strategy Media Teams for their diligence in building our journal and its podcast. Our open access journal in collaboration with the AHA ensures that our readership has free access to every article. We encourage you to submit your manuscript to S:VIN. Members receive an article processing fee discount; Wiley has global and institutional agreements that may significantly reduce or waive publishing fees.

Women in Vascular and Interventional Neurology (WIN)

The WIN committee of SVIN has been incredibly active. Under the leadership of Drs. Robin Novakovic and Cynthia Kenmuir, they have developed a mentorship program within SVIN, as well as a speaker registry to help connect meeting organizers with the right speaker(s).

The 2024 SVIN term has been off to a great start. I am excited to share with you incoming leaders of our SVIN committees here, who, along with you, will help us build on the many pillars of the SVIN mission.

My vision for the next 2-year term is not only to build on the momentum of our many bedrock initiatives as highlighted above, but also to:

1. grow and strengthen our collaborations with many stroke and neurointerventional societal organizations globally
2. build a foundation for Stroke Interventional Lab Certification (SILC) with the leadership of Drs. Ossama Mansour, Boris Pabon, Attila Ozcan Ozdemir, Nabeel Herial and Fawaz Al-Mufti
3. grow our SPEED initiative under the leadership of Drs. Brijesh Mehta and May Nour
4. build a live access portal for our trainees to know about available fellowship programs (open to stroke, UCNS, CAST or local graduate medical education fellowship programs)
5. build the SVIN philanthropic foundation reserve with Drs. Ameer Hassan, Santiago Ortega-Gutierrez, Fawaz Al Mufti, Gabor Toth, Mouhammad Jumaa, Italo Linfante (and other volunteers) upon which donors may choose the mission(s) they are most interested in supporting
6. develop and expand the mentorship and speaker registry initiatives that were seeded by Dr. Robin Novakovic and to continue under the leadership of Dr. Cynthia Kenmuir
7. engage and grow our membership under the leadership of Drs. Hesham Masoud and Jay Dolia

With much gratitude, I thank you for your time, ideas, dedication, and collaborations so we can achieve our goals together.

Sincerely,

Thanh N. Nguyen MD
SVIN President