INTRODUCTION
It is with great pleasure that I introduce the new members of our editorial team to the readership of the American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism (AJP-Endo). Getting into new shoes in the aftermath of the pandemic will be challenging, but with the magnificent work of the American Physiological Society (APS) Publications Department, we managed to bring on board an amazing team of Associate Editors. We take this moment to thank the previous editor, Andre Marette, and his team of Associate Editors for navigating the journal through the storm of the lockdown—an authentic tour de force getting the journal to where it is today. I particularly thank those who decided to stay along and the Publications Committee of APS for trusting my road map to globalize and diversify the journal. I truly look forward to collaborating with everyone as we work to further increase the impact of our journal while also increasing the geographical representation of our editorial team, reviewers, and certainly the authors. Here are your AJP-Endo Associate Editors, and a link to my biography can be found here: https://journals.physiology.org/ajpendo/editors-bio.
DEPUTY EDITOR
Gary Schwartz
Gary Schwartz is a Professor of Medicine, Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. His laboratory is focused on the identification and characterization of neural pathways linking the central nervous system to peripheral organs implicated in metabolism in diabetes and obesity, including gut, liver, and adipose tissue. His work has identified important roles for the gut-brain axis in the control of food intake, gastric emptying, and metabolism, as well as roles for central neuronal nutrient sensing in the control of glucose homeostasis and feeding. He has served as the director of the Skirball Institute for Nutrient Sensing, and also developed and currently directs the core laboratories of two major National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded centers focused on metabolism: the Animal Physiology Core of the Einstein- Mt. Sinai Diabetes Research Center, as well as the Animal Phenotyping Core of the New York Nutrition Obesity Research Center. Dr. Schwartz is author and coauthor of more than 150 scientific research publications, reviews, and book chapters, and is a fellow of the American Physiological Society, the American Gastroenterological Association, and the Obesity Society.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Alyssa H. Hasty
Alyssa Hasty received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 1999 and completed 2 years of postdoctoral work at Tokyo University. In 2003, she was hired into a tenure track position in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics (MPB) at Vanderbilt University where she is now a professor. She also has an appointment as a Research Health Scientist in the Veterans Affairs (VA). In 2017, she was named as a Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair holder. Her research laboratory focuses on immune-mediated mechanisms of cardiometabolic disease. Dr. Hasty has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and has received funding from the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, National Institutes of Health, and VA. She has trained nine postdoctoral fellows and 13 PhD graduate students. In addition, she has mentored over 30 undergraduate, Master’s Degree, and medical students and has sat on numerous Qualifying Exams, Dissertation Advisory Committees, and postdoc mentoring committees. She was one of the founding members of the Vanderbilt Women on Track Program and has been the Director of Career Development for the Digestive Diseases Research Center at Vanderbilt for 7 years. She is now the Associate Dean for Faculty in the Basic Sciences within the School of Medicine.
Anna Krook
Anna Krook is Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Krook’s research focuses on regulation of insulin sensitivity, particularly in skeletal muscle and the role of circulating factors in the regulation of insulin sensitivity. Recent research has focused on the role of miRNAs. In 2014, Dr. Krook received the LUDC Nordic prize for outstanding diabetes investigator. She is secretary of the scientific council for the Swedish Diabetes Foundation and current director of the Strategic Research Program in Diabetes at Karolinska Institutet.
Camilla Schéele
Camilla Schéele performed her PhD studies at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She relocated to Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007 and is now an Associate Professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen. She has contributed pioneering work on brown adipose tissue (BAT) in adult humans. Her research interests include the trajectories of developing adipocytes, the potential reactivation of dormant BAT, and the roles of batokines in an organ cross talk. In 2020, Dr. Scheele was awarded an ERC consolidator grant to study peptide-mediated cross talk between BAT and brain.
Jonathan Schertzer
Jonathan Schertzer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Dr. Schertzer is privileged to hold a Canada Research Chair in Metabolic Inflammation. His laboratory investigates immunometabolism in health and disease. He guides scientists to help understand how xenobiotics, diet, and microbial stress promote or combat obesity, prediabetes, and diabetic complications. Dr. Schertzer is excited to foster students and fellows to discover new aspects that connect host blood glucose and commensal or pathogenic bacteria. Dr. Schertzer’s research aims to define how the host-microbe relationship alters endocrine control of metabolism, including dynamic insulin and glucose responses and tissue-specific insulin sensitivity. More recently, this research aims to define “postbiotics” that alter host glucose and lipid metabolism. Dr. Schertzer’s team has a long-standing interest in understanding how stress alters the endocrine connections between adipose metabolism and muscle function. He has been an editorial board member of AJP-Endo since 2009.
Sarah Stanley
Sarah Stanley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease and Department of Neuroscience at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY. Dr. Stanley studied and trained as a physician at Cambridge University and practiced as an endocrinologist at London teaching hospitals, including The Hammersmith Hospital. She then received her PhD from Imperial College and completed her postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University under the mentorship of Dr. Jeffery Friedman. The focus of Dr. Stanley’s research is on the development of novel technologies to understand the central and peripheral neural circuits regulating glucose homeostasis. Dr. Stanley has received several awards, including the Hirschl/Weill-Caulier Scholar Award (2020) and Novo Nordisk Helmholtz Young Investigator in Diabetes Award (2017).
Licio A. Velloso
Licio A. Velloso is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Dr. Velloso obtained his MD from the University of Campinas, Brazil and his PhD, in the field of endocrine autoimmunity, from Uppsala University, Sweden. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Velloso provided one of the earliest evidence for a molecular cross talk between a GPCR and a tyrosine kinase receptor. As an independent researcher, Dr. Velloso identified some of the main mechanisms leading to hypothalamic dysfunction in experimental and human obesity. Currently, Dr. Velloso coordinates the Obesity and Comorbidities Research Center, which gathers 13 of the most productive Brazilian researchers in the fields of obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, and pharmaceutical chemistry. He has published over 350 scientific papers and supervised 42 PhD students. Dr. Velloso is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the Endocrine Society, USA and the Neuroscience Society, USA.
Matthew Watt
Matthew Watt heads the Department of Physiology at the University of Melbourne and is a Senior Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. He leads an innovative research program that seeks to identify how defects of lipid metabolism and intertissue communication cause obesity-related disorders, and to use this information to discover novel targets that can be transitioned to clinical therapeutics. Professor Watt has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has contributed to the discipline through his leadership roles with the Australian Physiological Society and contributions to undergraduate learning and teaching and mentorship of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students.
Wenwen Zeng
Wenwen Zeng is a Principal Investigator of the Institute for Immunology and School of Medicine at the Tsinghua University. Dr. Zeng received her B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She worked on biochemical reconstitution of the RIG-I antiviral pathway with Dr. James Zhijian Chen at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas while pursuing her PhD. She then joined Genentech Inc., studying Th17 differentiation. She continued postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University and worked on sympathetic-regulated lipolysis under the mentorship of Dr. Jeffrey Friedman. Her group at Tsinghua University is working on the brain-body interaction in energy balance under the neuroimmune regulation. She was awarded the Young Investigator Award in 2015, Outstanding Young Scholar Award from Qiu-Shi Science & Technologies Foundation in 2016, Young Investigator Award from Lipid Metabolism and Bioenergetics Subsociety of the Biophysical Society of China in 2018, and the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholar in 2018.
The AJP website lists the complete biographies of the editorial team: https://journals.physiology.org/ajpendo/edboard.
While assembling the Editorial Team, we insisted on gender balance, diversity, and geographical representation that goes outside the beaten path to include members from Brazil and China—both of which are countries frankly expanding in science investment. We have also turned over the Editorial Board to meet the scientific needs of publishing in novel directions. We will keep delivering succinct, fair, and timely reviews of your manuscripts. We will be using the peer review system’s editorial consultation feature as needed before sending a manuscript for external review and before making triage decisions for papers that may not fit our scope. Editorial consultation sessions thus function as a prophylaxis on reviewer exhaustion.
PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES FROM THE EDITORIAL TEAM
Calls for Papers
We currently have two Calls for Papers that are open until April 2023. Immunometabolism with Dr. Alyssa H. Hasty, Dr. Licio A. Velloso, and Dr. Wenwen Zeng who have generously agreed to be lead Editors on this Call. Dr. Gary Schwartz and Dr. Sarah A. Stanley are lead Editors on the Call for Papers in Neural Control of Metabolism. The journal will announce more calls throughout the year, and we are open to suggestions from our readers.
Immunometabolism: https://journals.physiology.org/ajpendo/immunometabolism
Neural Controls of Metabolism: https://journals.physiology.org/ajpendo/neural-controls-of-metabolism
Collections
The journal website lists our collections (https://journals.physiology.org/ajpendo/collections). These are an excellent resource for authors and reviewers to identify recently published manuscripts in your area of research. Authors submitting to a Call for Papers will have accepted papers added to that Collection. In addition, Editors can assign papers to a Collection after acceptance, and new Collections will be created for themed article compilations.
Expanding Our Article Formats to Highlight Resource Papers
We appreciate that minable datasets are precious resources but are often kept in the drawer when time is limited to conduct functional studies—especially during mitigating circumstances such as the lockdown. We want to liberate our authors from such restrictions and make their data available to be mined by the community. We are thus exploring how we can open AJP-Endo to submission of datasets that would be useful resources to the community in addition to articles using novel techniques and protocols. We are actively working with the APS Publications office and to find a home for such article content.
First Author Spotlight
We will soon be adopting AJP-Renal’s initiative of shining a spotlight on our first authors. All of them tend to stay in the shadow of recognition. Authors will be highlighted in the online journal with a picture and a short biography. We encourage first authors to take advantage of this upcoming feature and to submit necessary files when prompted to ensure inclusion.
Graphical Abstracts
Graphical abstracts are part of the submission process, and a PowerPoint template to aid in the production of adequately formatted graphical abstracts is available to authors (https://journals.physiology.org/author-info.manuscript-composition). These abstracts will be featured on the AJP-Endo website and can be used on social media to promote your work.
APSselect
Our team will continue to nominate AJP-Endo manuscripts for the monthly APSselect program, and you will see these awards being highlighted by the APS Marketing and Communications Department (https://journals.physiology.org/journal/apsselect).
AJP-Endo Social Media Connections
We encourage you to connect with our journal and the editorial team on social media.
Here are our social media connections:
Alyssa H. Hasty (@ahasty4)
Camilla Schéele (@CamillaScheele)
Jonathan Schertzer (@SchertzerLab)
AJP-Endo Twitter (@AJPEndoMetab)
Facebook AJP-Endo (https://www.facebook.com/ajpendometab/)
Please use your social media to amplify our published papers and news stories and keep submitting your best work to AJP-Endo.
GRANTS
A.I.D. laboratory is supported by ERC co -2017 COG 771431 and Wellcome/HHMI IRS award 208576/Z/17/Z.
DISCLOSURES
No conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise, are declared by the authors.
Ana Domingos is an editor of American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism and was not involved and did not have access to information regarding the peer-review process or final disposition of this article. An alternate editor oversaw the peer-review and decision-making process for this article.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
A.I.D. drafted manuscript; edited and revised manuscript; and approved final version of manuscript.