Martin John, MD Wins NY State Thieves Market Competition

We are pleased to announce that first year fellow, Dr. Martin John, has been selected as one of three winners at the 5th Annual Thieves Market Competition, hosted by the New York State Rheumatology Society!

Trainees across New York State are invited annually to present a patient with a rare disease, or common disease with an unusual presentation. The top three submissions were selected for an oral presentation during the Annual Fall Meeting on Saturday, September 20, 2025.

The original Sungei Road Thieves Market was founded in the 1930s, as a small trading place along the Rochor River in Singapore, where it garnered, perhaps unjustly, the reputation for reselling stolen goods. In any event, the analogy relates to discovering the extraordinary, the unusual and the fascinating, similar to the most impressive and surprising cases Rheumatologists face on inpatient consult services across the globe.

Similarly, Dr. John was selected to serve as a Fellow-in-Training member of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) E-Learning Subcommittee.

As a member, Dr. John will help the subcommittee oversee the quality, creation and implementation of enduring materials related to the Committee on Training, charged with the purpose of identifying synergies, avoiding duplication, identifying trends, and evaluating metrics. Core online educational programming to be evaluated include COT’s online educational activities such as ViP, ViTLs, V-FIT, Rheum2Learn, and Rheum4Science.

In Columbia's Division of Rheumatology & Clinical Immunology, we're striving to train the best clinical and educational leaders of tomorrow. We're inspired by Dr. John's committment to our education mission and can't wait to see the impact this subcommittee will have on enduring Rheumatology e-learning materials.

Congratulations for these wonderful achievements are in order for Dr. John! We're so excited to see him continue to grow as a rising leader at Columbia University/NY-Presbyterian Hospital. The future is surely bright in the caring hands and minds of our fellow leaders.