Hello everyone from Beirut. First I would like to thank you all for trusting me with leading the Asia Pacific Chapter. It is an honor and I hope I live up to your trust. It will be a short term because the China meeting was cancelled and thus I took up my responsibilities in Hyderabad in November. That was quite a successful meeting considering WAS only had five months to prepare instead of the normal two years. Many thanks to the two past presidents of APC, Dr. Salin Krishna and Dr. Bibha Kumari for their dedicated and hard work to make the meeting a success. Attendance was great and the trade show a resounding success.

The new board of WAS/APC had their first meeting in December 2025 and has been meeting regularly since. It is a short term but we are trying to make it a productive term. We decided to help our student members by offering 24 students (12 men and 12 women) lodging for the WAS/APC conference in Singapore in June. The application process should be on the website of the chapter. Our student director, Dr. Fanny Yasumaru worked hard to find a suitable hotel and negotiate a good price. Additionally two of the board members, Dr. Denny Leonardo Utomo and Dr. Alastair Smart have been working on updating our webpage to bring it into the 21st century. The new web page should be much more accessible from smart phones and have a much better searchable database. This will take time and will be followed up by president elect Dr. Jie Huang who is now busy evaluating APC members to whom we intend to give awards in Singapore.

I just came back from representing APC at the WAS board meeting in Las Vegas. Our mother society’s board is undergoing a major review of the society as a whole and in a couple of years we should be enjoying the fruits of our hard working Drs. Wendy Sealy (president) and Kathleen Hartman (head of the review committee). A lot of ideas about what services WAS should offer to our members and the aquaculture community in general were discussed. While all this is happening, aquaculture in Asia and the Pacific continues to grow and we continue to lead the world in production and innovation. While the rest of the world talks about using AI in aquaculture, developing protocols to farm new species, find sustainable methods to grow aquaculture, train future generations etc., we in the Asia Pacific region are doing all those things.

My next goal is to increase our membership from under-represented countries. There are several aquaculture powerhouses in the Asia Pacific region that are not well represented in our membership. I have spoken to some aquaculture stakeholders in these countries and they have legitimate concerns. The main complaint was that they did not see any tangible benefits from being members of WAS. I promise to address their concerns and try to start a process which will lead to a time where all stakeholders in the aquaculture community will find it beneficial to be members of WAS/APC.

Again, I thank the members of WAS/APC for giving me their trust and I hope to live up to their expectations.
— Imad Saoud, President