2024: Reflections on a year of supporting and promoting our early-career researchers

The future of comparative physiology and biomechanics rests in the capable hands of our early-career researchers (ECRs). Through their planning, execution and publication of novel research, they are shaping our field, publishing research that is both inspiring and impactful. Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) is committed to supporting and enabling the next generation of experimental biologists through running workshops, providing funding opportunities for travel and highlighting their outstanding achievements through sponsoring awards and promoting their research.

With this goal in mind, JEB organised and sponsored two ECR workshops in 2024. At the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Zoologists (CSZ) in New Brunswick, Canada in May, four of JEB's Editors, together with several members of the Editorial Advisory Board, led a two-hour workshop entitled ‘Positive Peer Review’ aimed at graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty staff. Delegates critiqued mock reviews, and trainers facilitated small-group discussions on topics such as how to set the right tone in manuscript reviews, what criteria to use when deciding between recommending major revision or rejection and what to include in confidential comments to the Editor. In July, at The Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) annual meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, we organised a half-day science communication workshop for ECRs. Led by the journal's Editors, including the in-house News & Views team, this interactive session included presentations, writing activities and discussion groups to guide ECRs in how best to communicate research findings to a broad audience beyond their peers and how to create a compelling cover letter to promote their research to a journal. As one ECR said after the meeting, ‘what I have learnt will be useful for many different applications, ranging from press releases to projects for funding applications’.

JEB and its publisher, The Company of Biologists, now directly support three grant schemes specifically targeted at ECRs working across the scientific fields encompassed by the journal. The Travelling Fellowship programme for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, which has been running since 1996, provides successful applicants the chance to visit another lab to conduct a collaborative research project. In 2024, JEB awarded 42 Travelling Fellowships with a total value of £115,820 to ECRs from 20 different countries. As part of our 100th anniversary celebrations in 2023, JEB extended its grant programme to include two new grants aimed specifically at junior faculty staff (e.g. Lecturers, Assistant Professors, Group Leaders and Principal Investigators) within the first 5 years of setting up their lab/research group. The first of these – the Research Partnership Kickstart Travel Grant – is designed to help early faculty who wish to travel to another lab or field site to specifically plan and initiate the writing of a collaborative funding grant to an external peer-reviewed granting programme. For example, Dr Pauline Fleischmann, a Research Group Fellow at Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany, received funds to visit Professor Eric Warrant, Lund University, Sweden, at his field site in Australia, where he studies migrating bogong moths (Fig. 1A). The visit allowed Fleischmann to interact with the team from Lund, experience first-hand the challenges and opportunities at this site while enabling the planning of a collaborative project to study ‘one of the most significant and puzzling problems in modern sensory biology’ (go to https://bit.ly/4fWB7iD to find out more about this project and collaboration). On the back of this visit, Fleischmann has now successfully applied for a Konishi Neuroethology Research Award from the International Society for Neuroethology and is collaborating with Warrant and 23 other Principal Investigators on another major grant application. ‘The Research Partnership Kickstart Travel Grant from the Journal of Experimental Biology has made this possible, and I am thrilled that I will have the chance to return to Australia to perform the first experiments as soon as the next migratory season’, says Fleischmann. JEB's ECR Visiting Fellowship grants are also targeted at junior faculty members and provide funding to recruit a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow from another lab and location to visit and collaborate on a research project. For instance, Lecturer Dr Zenon Czenze from University of New England, Australia, was successful in obtaining a grant to bring PhD student Dylan Baloun from University of Saskatchewan, Canada, to work in his field lab for 3 months on a project investigating the heat tolerance limits of insectivorous bats across an aridity gradient, with the aim of identifying populations at greatest risk of climate change (Fig. 1B). According to Czenze, ‘the grant was pivotal for the growth and capacity building of my lab, resulted in a significant increase in both the quantity and quality of our research outputs, facilitated new collaborations and greatly contributed to the development of young PhD students’. Since launching these junior faculty grants in 2023, we have funded 16 proposals, distributing an additional £31,800 to ECRs.

To further support upcoming researchers, the journal also sponsors ECR awards/prizes at scientific conferences. In 2024, these included: the Young Scientists Award (Animal Section) at the annual meeting of SEB, which was awarded to Dr Patrice Pottier, for his PhD research at University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia, on the vulnerability of amphibians to extreme heat events; the Carl Gans Young Investigator Award at the main meeting of The Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology (SICB), awarded to Dr Michael Granatosky, New York Institute of Technology, USA, for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics; and two awards at the annual CSZ meeting – the Robert G. Boutilier New Investigator Award, awarded to Dr Katie Marshall, University of British Columbia, Canada, for her work on cold tolerance in invertebrates, and the George F. Holeton prize for the most outstanding student presentation in the Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry (CPB) Section, awarded to Amalie Hutchinson of Western University, Canada, for her presentation on the mitochondrial physiology of torpor in ruby-throated hummingbirds (Fig. 2). On top of this, The Company of Biologists provides significant funding (£37,500 per year) to the SEB for their travel grant scheme to allow ECRs to attend conferences, workshops, research trips and laboratory visits. In 2024, 57 travel grants were handed out by the SEB to awardees across 23 countries under this scheme.

In 2024, JEB published a special themed issue – The Integrative Biology of the Heart – the first of a series of special issues focusing on a specific physiological system. We were delighted to offer the opportunity to an ECR – Dr William Joyce, a Postdoctoral Junior Leader fellow based at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) in Madrid, Spain (Fig. 3A) – to be a Guest Editor for the issue and also to be the lead author on a Commentary that provides a synthesis of many of the articles in the issue, centred around the theme of cardiac plasticity (Joyce et al., 2024). The second special issue in this series – The Integrative Biology of the Gut – will be published later this year, and Dr Matthew Regan, an Assistant Professor at Université de Montréal, Canada (Fig. 3B), will be one of the three Guest Editors.

Finally, in 2024, we promoted over 100 emerging experimental biologists in our ECR Spotlight interviews (see https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/pages/ECR-spotlight). These articles highlight not only the excellent research being undertaken but also the geographic spread of our community, with featured ECRs based in institutions located on every continent except Antarctica – although, one ECR does work on Adelie penguins in Antarctica! In a few weeks, we will also be announcing the ECRs who have been nominated by the journal Editors for the 2024 JEB Outstanding Paper Prize – look out for the upcoming News article where we discuss their research and announce the winning paper.

As 2025 begins, marking the centenary of The Company of Biologists, we would like to take the opportunity to thank our outstanding Editors, Editorial Advisory Board and in-house editorial staff, who collectively administer, assess and edit the large number of submissions we receive every year. We also wish to express our gratitude to all our authors and reviewers (see supplementary information for a list of everyone who reviewed for the journal in 2024). It is pleasing to see that there are signs that the community is starting to rebound from the pandemic; over 1200 research papers and over 2000 reviewer reports were submitted to JEB in 2024. We know many authors are appreciative and benefit from receiving reviews that provide a constructive and thoughtful assessment of their science. The JEB community is at its strongest when the next generation of authors, our ECRs, are supported and thriving in their research endeavours, and we can all enjoy the discoveries being made. We look forward to publishing some wonderful thought-provoking papers in 2025 and encourage you to look out for our forthcoming special issues: ‘Integrating Biomechanics, Energetics and Ecology in Locomotion’ and ‘The Integrative Biology of the Gut’.