The Recent Fifteen Years of JAFES (2010–2025)

Places We Visited, Pathways We Blazed, and Networks We Multiplied

Abstract

November 2025 will be remembered in a special way: a moment when we got to look back to the recent fifteen years, look in, and look forward again to the future.

The ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies (AFES) is an organization that has always been close to our hearts at the Philippine Society of Endocrinology and Metabolism or PSEM (later Philippine Society of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Endocrinology or PSEDM; and currently Philippine College of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism or PCEDM). Filipino endocrinologists have been active participants in AFES from the time of the founding in 1981, with our own founding member Dr. Augusto D. Litonjua. My active involvement as Immediate Past President of the PSEM in 2002 was marked by the launch of a commemorative coffee-table book during 12^th AFES meeting in Singapore in 2003, entitled AFES 1981-2003: Renewing our Commitment to the ASEAN Region. Through then AFES President and the Endocrine and Metabolic Society of Singapore President Dr. Daphne Khoo, we shared this special historical token at that meeting. It was a sentimental display of the strengths of each of the member organizations and a welcome to new member Vietnam, under the leadership of Professor Mai The Trach, Founding Member and then First Vice-President, Vietnam Association of Diabetes and Endocrinology, the first new member since the inception of the AFES.