From left to right: Sophie Acton, Pedro Carvalho, Guillaume Jacquemet, Charlotte Kirchhelle and Aryeh Warmflash.
It might not always feel like it, especially if your paper has just been rejected, but academic editors play an important role in publishing, aiming to support the scientific community and help authors publish their work. It's a privileged role that I have enjoyed and one that I would recommend to anyone if you are approached by a reputable journal that you read or would publish in. However, at times it can be difficult, and I'm not talking here about the time it takes to find reviewers or rejecting papers of friends and colleagues, which does happen. I think most editors would agree, it is when the papers arriving in our in boxes don't fully match our expertise. We still obviously handle these papers in a fair and professional way and frequently consult our Editorial Advisory Board for advice. With time, we also acquire expertise in topics outside our own area of research. Nevertheless, new topics and papers still turn up that none of us can fully cover. I guess this is to be expected given the broad and ever-expanding nature of cell biology, with new models and techniques appearing with ever-increasing frequency. We want to look forward and embrace these new areas of research where some of the most exciting cell biology is happening right now.
At the same time, we also need to expand on existing topics that are important but under-represented in the journal. We have already taken a step in this direction by publishing special issues on topics such as plant cell biology (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/issue/131/2), the cell biology of the immune system (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/issue/133/5) and, more recently, imaging techniques and analysis (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/issue/137/20). All of these topics have been well-received, but we now want to take another step to ensure that JCS can continue to support the wider cell biology community.
We are therefore delighted to welcome five new Associate Editors to the JCS team who will each handle articles in their respective fields of research: Sophie Acton (immune cell biology), Pedro Carvalho (proteostasis), Guillaume Jacquemet (imaging and image analysis), Charlotte Kirchhelle (plant cell biology) and Aryeh Warmflash (stem cell biology and modelling). You can read more about them below and in the interview articles published in this issue and previously.
Sophie Acton is a Professor of Immunology at University College London, UK, and a Senior Cancer Research UK Fellow. She graduated from the University of Bath in 2004 and received her PhD from UCL in 2008, studying mechanisms of tumour cell metastasis with Erik Sahai. Sophie then spent time as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and at the Francis Crick Institute, London, working on immune cell trafficking and remodelling of lymphoid tissues. She started her group at University College London in 2016, working on the stromal-immune cell crosstalk regulating immune responses within lymphoid tissues and tumour microenvironments. Sophie joined the Journal of Cell Science team as an Associate Editor in 2025. You can find out more about Sophie in a recent interview published in the journal (doi:10.1242/jcs.242941).
Pedro Carvalho studied biochemistry at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. He earned his PhD from the University of Porto in Portugal for work conducted in David Pellman's laboratory at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, USA. Following his PhD, Pedro joined Harvard Medical School, also in Boston, as a postdoctoral researcher in Tom Rapoport's laboratory. In 2010, he established his own laboratory at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain. In 2016, Pedro moved to the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, UK, where he was appointed the EP Abraham Professor of Cell Biology. His laboratory focuses on investigating quality control mechanisms that maintain endoplasmic reticulum homeostasis, including ER-associated protein degradation. You can read more about Pedro in the interview published in this issue (doi:10.1242/jcs.263774).
Guillaume Jacquemet earned his PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, and then carried postdoctoral training at the University of Turku, Finland. He currently serves as an Associate Professor at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. His laboratory uses and develops live imaging and image analysis methodologies to investigate how cancer cells interact with and respond to their surroundings during metastasis. Guillaume was Guest Editor for the 2024 ‘Imaging cell architecture and dynamics’ special issue, and we're delighted that he'll be continuing on as an Associate Editor. You can read more about Guillaume and his research in a recent interview with him (doi:10.1242/jcs.260555).
Charlotte Kirchhelle completed a PhD in interdisciplinary biosciences at the University of Oxford, UK, in 2017. Her project focused on endomembrane trafficking during plant morphogenesis and demonstrated that plant cells specify their edges as essential domains of directional growth control. After her PhD, she continued her research on edge-based growth control as a post-doc and independent research fellow in Oxford, before moving to the Plant Development and Reproduction Laboratory (RDP) at the ENS de Lyon in 2021, where she is a permanent Research Fellow funded by the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAe). At the RDP laboratory, she leads the Mechanotransduction in Development team, which uses a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate how geometric and mechanical factors pattern intracellular transport and cell identity to promote robust morphogenesis. In 2024, Charlotte was selected to be part of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme. Find out more about Charlotte's career and research in the interview article in this issue (doi:10.1242/jcs.263775).
Aryeh Warmflash earned his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago, USA, where his work focused on non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and mathematical modelling of cell fate decisions. He completed postdoctoral training in the labs of Eric Siggia and Ali Brivanlou at Rockefeller University, USA, where he transitioned to studying early embryonic development using a combination of modelling and experiments. He started his own lab at Rice University, USA, in 2014. His research focuses on morphogen signalling dynamics and self-organized developmental patterning during mammalian gastrulation and neurulation, using human embryonic stem cells as a model system. You can read more about Aryeh's research in the interview article in this issue (doi:10.1242/jcs.263773).
Please join me in welcoming Sophie, Pedro, Guillaume, Charlotte and Aryeh to the journal. I'd also like to encourage those of you working on the topics covered by these editors to consider submitting to JCS. In case you're not aware, there are many reasons to choose JCS: in addition to being trusted by the community, it's free to publish in the journal, we're published by a respected and not-for-profit publisher, and we plant a tree for every peer-reviewed article we publish. We're also much more than just a journal (Grewal and Way, 2023), providing travel and training fellowships for ECRs, hosting an online community site for cell biologists and microscopists (including jobs and events boards), and organising various workshops and events for the community. You can find out more about these and other reasons to choose JCS on our website (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/reasons-to-submit).
We hope that the addition of these editors to our excellent team of existing Editors (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/editor-bios) means that JCS can expand its reach across the cell biology community and continue to publish cutting-edge research that covers the full breadth of topics in the field (https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/aims). If you're unsure about whether JCS is the right home for your research, or if you have any questions about publishing in the journal, please do get in touch – we're always happy to hear from you.
