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- 2024 CAP Outstanding Educator Award
The College of American Pathologists (CAP) Outstanding Educator Award, established in 2018, recognizes outstanding performance and significant contributions in the advancement of professional development opportunities for pathologists and laboratory professionals. It is presented to an individual who has consistently demonstrated outstanding performance as faculty for a CAP education activity and/or has made outstanding contributions in the development of education activities for pathologists and/or laboratory professionals.
Robert Michael Najarian, MD, FCAP
The College of American Pathologists presents Robert Michael Najarian, MD, FCAP, with the CAP Outstanding Educator of the Year Award in recognition of his commitment to educating pathologists through various media, especially live continuing medical education events.
Dr. Najarian chaired the CAP Curriculum Committee from 2020 to 2023, leading the group through the myriad of challenges, most prominently, a COVID-19 pandemic-induced pivot to an entirely virtual educational event (the 2020 Annual Meeting). Following CAP20, he led efforts to convert the next three annual meetings to an innovative hybrid learning model. Under his leadership, the CAP annual meeting educational content consistently maintained excellent attendee ratings, despite dramatic changes in meeting format.
Dr. Najarian’s success on the Curriculum Committee continued when he developed, through a Board of Governors’ collaboration, a Council-driven Hot Topic pathway that streamlined the course submission and review process for rapidly evolving and newsworthy technologies within our specialty. As part of the Curriculum Committee’s ongoing commitment to innovation in learning, he spearheaded introduction of digital slide utilization for video microscopy courses, first launched at CAP23.
Dr. Najarian also contributed his expertise to the CAP Learning Portfolio through his involvement with the Learning Portfolio Subcommittee and was instrumental in the development of the Destination CME program. In 2021, he served on a Council on Education work group formed to help identify educational content and format it for the MyCAP app. The work group also recommended the creation of the FastFive Challenge program, which launched in 2022 and is currently available in MyCAP.
Throughout his tenure as chair of the Curriculum Committee, Dr. Najarian demonstrated exceptional leadership through significant transitions and championed diversity with respect to committee membership and faculty selected for the Annual Meeting and destination CME.
He currently serves as an advisor to the Curriculum Committee, member of the Information Technology Leadership Committee, and as an expert panel member on the Center Guideline Committee’s Gastroenteropancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors evidence-based guideline.
Dr. Najarian is a partner and consultant in gastrointestinal and liver pathology at Metrowest Pathology Associates, PC, which serves both hospital systems and private laboratories in Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut.