Year: 2016

All chemists like flashes, bangs and smells – in conversation with Professor Richard N. Zare.

Liz Allen Journal News

Nonprofit research publisher Annual Reviews is fortunate to have the ongoing support of many illustrious researchers that serve on our Boards and Committees. Professor Richard N. Zare is the Chairperson of the Annual Reviews Board of Directors and the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science at Stanford University, USA.

laserRichard was interviewed about his life and work by his former postdoc Dr. Andrew Alexander, who is a reader in Chemical Physics from Edinburgh University in Scotland. Andy prepared a series of short videos from his conversation that vary in length from 2-4 minutes which makes the content highly watchable.

That the pair know each other well is immediately clear through the relaxed and frequently funny tone of the videos which have 13 themes ranging from one entitled “Motorbike Story” through “Mentoring a Research Group” (pictured below, the Zarelab, 2016).

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Across the video series, Richard tells self-deprecating stories from his early childhood and young adult years that shape the person he has become today. He also explains his professional path to success as a combination of a series of influential relationships combined with an innate curiosity which he believes is a key component for a productive scientific career.

As Richard says: “Follow your heart – find something you love and throw yourself into it.” Those wishing to dig deeper into his work with Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) can read his Autobiographical article “My Life with LIF: A Personal Account of Developing Laser-Induced Fluorescence.” If you are interested in seeing some photos of the young Richard and finding out even more about his life then we invite you to read this additional article “The Hydrogen Games and Other Adventures in Chemistry.”

U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden Cites AR Article in WSJ Op-Ed

Liz Allen Journal News

Earlier this week, we were delighted to learn that U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden referenced one of our articles in his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled “How Short-Termism Saps the Economy.”

Vice President Joe Biden. Image credit, public domain, Wikipedia.
Vice-President Joe Biden. Image credit, public domain, Wikipedia.

“Short-termism—the notion that companies forgo long-run investment to boost near-term stock price—is one of the greatest threats to America’s enduring prosperity,” Biden writes.

Further down the piece, the WSJ links to an article in the Annual Review of Financial Economics entitled “CEO Compensation,” written by expert authors Carola Frydman and Dirk Jenter. In it, they describe the evolution of CEO pay and discuss the impact of the oftentimes direct link between share price and compensation.

If you don’t subscribe to the WSJ, you can register to read the article for 24 hours without a credit card.

 

MacArthur Fellows, Class of 2016

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Our warmest congratulations to the 23 people honored this year by the MacArthur Foundation for “breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences, often in unexpected ways.”

Among them is Dianne K. Newman, a Microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology and of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is also an Editorial Committee Member of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Dianne Newman
Dianne Newman, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, 09.08.2016.

Dr. Newman’s research in microbiology spans across disciplines, from geobiology to biomedicine: she and her group study bacteria that thrive in low-oxygen environments, such as bacteria that “breathe” arsenic or iron, as was the case in Earth’s early atmosphere. This work has taken them to study the metabolism of Pseudonoma aeruginosa, an opportunistic bacterium that thrives in mucus-filled lungs where oxygen is limited, such as those of cystic fibrosis patients. This could open the door to more effective treatment of these infections. Browse the articles she wrote for Annual Reviews here.

Another 2016 MacArthur Fellow is Bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum, of Rice University.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum
Rebecca Richards-Kortum, 2016 MacArthur Fellow, BioScience Research Collaborative at Rice University, Houston, August 31, 2016.

Dr. Richards-Kortum and her students create cheap and effective solutions that seek to redress imbalances in access to health care across the world. Their products have helped overcome challenges in the diagnosis of various types of cancers, but also for the care of premature newborns or babies with jaundice. Read her article for the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry here.

Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

2016 Lasker Awards

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Congratulations to the winners of the 2016 Lasker awards.

1. Basic Medical Research Award:

William G. Kaelin, of Dana Farber-Harvard Cancer Center.

Gregg L. Semenza, of Johns Hopkins University.

They helped identify how all animals react to variations in oxygen. They share the award with Peter J. Ratcliffe, of Oxford University. Click on their names to read the articles they wrote for various Annual Reviews journals.

2. Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award:

Charles M. Rice, of Rockefeller University.

He shares the award with Ralf  F. W. Bartenschlager, of the University of Heidelberg, and Michael J. Sofia, of Arbutus Biopharma. Drs. Rice and Bartenschlager were able to find a way to make the Hepatitis C virus replicate in laboratory conditions, which allowed research to proceed. Dr. Sofia then developed a drug that made it possible to treat the disease.  Click on Dr. Rice’s name to browse the articles he wrote for various Annual Reviews journals.

3. Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science:

Bruce M. Alberts, of the University of California, San Francisco.

He was recognized for his work in molecular biology and his efforts toward science education. Click on his name to browse the articles he wrote for the Annual Review of Biochemistry.

2017 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing – Call for Nominations in Criminology

Liz Allen Awards

Annual Reviews is pleased to sponsor the 2017 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Scientific Reviewing, presented in criminology.

The award was established in 1977 through a gift from Annual Reviews together with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to recognize the importance of reviews to the scientific method. Annual Reviews currently sponsors the award in its entirety.

The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing recognizes authors whose publications have reviewed important subjects of research, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course of scientific thought. Since its establishment, the award has been presented to 38 recipients, two who have gone on to win a National Medal of Science in the Biological Sciences and two who proceeded to win a Nobel Prize.

This year’s selection committee defines “reviews” broadly to include not only formal review articles but any publication that synthesizes and critiques existing research, offering useful new perspectives on a field. The award will honor the cumulative effect of the candidate’s writings, which may be embodied in multiple publications. To nominate a review author in the field of Criminology, you must submit your application by Monday, October 3, 2016.

Annual Reviews was founded as a nonprofit organization to synthesize the ever-increasing volume of scientific research and data in a growing number of disciplines. Since the publication of the first Annual Review of Biochemistry in 1932 to our newest journal the Annual Review of Criminology in 2018, Annual Reviews has brought to its readers the best in comprehensive scientific review literature.

The NAS is a private, nonprofit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community.

Our Microbial Partners

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Congratulations to Ed Yong on his new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, in which he explores the microbes that live and multiply all over humans and other animals, helping us thrive and shaping our behavior.

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While our view of microbes is still heavily skewed by the germ theory of disease, which paints them solely as pathogens, recent research has shown that an estimated 50% of the cells we carry around are microbial in nature, and only a fraction of these actually make us ill.

In fact, each animal is an ecosystem and our individual microbiomes play an essential role in keeping us healthy. They help us evolve, break down nutrients from the food we eat so we can better assimilate them, teach our immune system how to defend us from disease, and favor brain development, among other things. Scientists even found that germ-free mice exhibited autism-like behavior, and that probiotic therapies can have positive effects on depression and anxiety.

Yong cited seven of our articles in his book, all of which you can access for free for the next 30 days

The Influence of Milk Oligosaccharides on Microbiota of Infants: Opportunities for Formulas, Annual Review of Food Science and Technology
Biofilms and Marine Invertebrate Larvae: What Bacteria Produce That Larvae Use to Choose Settlement Sites, Annual Review of Marine Science
The Microbiome in Infectious Disease and Inflammation, Annual Review of Immunology
Ecological Physiology of Diet and Digestive Systems, Annual Review of Physiology
Vaginal Microbiome: Rethinking Health and Disease, Annual Review of Microbiology
Human Milk Glycans Protect Infants Against Enteric Pathogens, Annual Review of Nutrition
The Human Gut Microbiome: Ecology and Recent Evolutionary Change, Annual Review of Microbiology

For more, listen to Yong discussing his book with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross on August 18, 2016.

Annual Reviews at the SSP Annual Meeting – Vancouver bound!

Liz Allen Conferences & Events

SSP38thAM_SmallImageThe Annual Reviews team is heading to Vancouver next week to continue our participation in the Annual SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) meeting which has previously been held right on our doorstep in San Francisco (we’re based in Palo Alto). We’re looking forward to flying out of the fog and exploring a new city!

For those of you who don’t know us, Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher of highly cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in a clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

Here’s a brief rundown of who will be there and the panels where you can find them:

Also in attendance, Marquita Druker (Marketing Specialist), Anna Fleming (Institutional Marketing Specialist) and Andrea Burtness (Project Coordinator, IT).

We look forward to meeting you there.

Leader and Leadership Development

Liz Allen News

We now know that leaders are mostly made, not born.

As organizations worldwide put a growing emphasis on finding, developing, and keeping leaders, leadership development has drawn from decades of research to become a discrete scholarly field of organizational psychology.

Establishing a framework for this field can help individuals and organizations create and expand their capabilities for effective leadership.

In their article “Leadership Development: An Outcome-Oriented Review Based on Time and Levels of Analyses,” David Day and Lisa Dragoni outline this framework and review the current knowledge to set up a theoretical foundation for future research.

“Leader development” implies a focus on individual leaders to identify short-term indicators that the work will bring about positive long-term outcomes. In this first video, Dr. Day, of the University of Western Australia, tells us more:

Once these indicators are established, Dr. Day goes on to explain that effectiveness of leadership should not be the goal of research and intervention. Instead, the goal should be to expand and enhance a leader’s capacity to be effective:

Beyond the individual, there are things organizations can do to foster leadership. In this video, Dr. Dragoni discusses the conditions that support leadership development. These include interpersonal comfort among team members, their expertise, and a shared mindset:

Lastly, Dr. Dragoni presents new avenues of research for leadership development. She insists that it is important to be very clear about the definition of the terms in order to advance this science.

Read the article in the 2015 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, with our compliments. 

The secret is out – calling all science writers!

Liz Allen Announcements, Conferences & Events, Journalists

Annual Reviews logo.

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher of highly cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in a clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

Journalists, bloggers and writers tell us that we’re a “go-to resource” when it comes to researching the background on a story or on days when they have to deliver a piece and inspiration is thin on the ground!

Reading our reviews is like “being transported into the laboratory of the leading scientists in the area, who explain what’s going on in the field”. They come away with a richer understanding than they could gain in any other way.

Image credit: marcmo, Flickr, CC BY NC-ND
Image credit: marcmo, Flickr, CC BY NC-ND

To access this highly cited content that spans 47 disciplines within the Biomedical, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences including Economics all you have to do is email your writing credentials to marketing@annualreviews.org. It’s that simple.

If you use Annual Reviews content, please credit the Author/s and the name of the journal. You are welcome to link directly to our article and if you do so, let us know beforehand (email address as above) and we will provide your readers with complimentary access.

Annual Reviews is a treasured writers resource because every article:

  • Synthesizes the most significant research contributions on the most critical topics
  • Provides a thorough and balanced understanding of a subject from invited experts
  • Helps situate research within current understanding of a topic, including what is well supported and what is controversial.
  • Explores the interface between fields as most progress takes place at the confluence of two or more fields. We enable researchers to reach across disciplinary boundaries.
  • Provides historical context and sweeping panoramas of where research fields originated, where they stand now, and where they should go.
  • Poses compelling questions for the future.
  • Outlines practical applications and the broad general significance of research to the wider public.
  • Stands as a testament to human ingenuity in terms of our understanding of nature, the universe, and the human condition.

WCSJAnnual Reviews is also a proud early sponsor of the World Conference of Science Journalists taking place in San Francisco in 2017. We look forward to providing you with Free WiFi for a day and meeting you all there! To find out more about the event you can sign up for the conference newsletter.

Congrats Sergio Verdú – winner of the 2016 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing

Liz Allen Awards, News

Annual Reviews is a non-profit publisher of highly-cited reviews that synthesize the research literature in clear and compelling style to stimulate discussion about the science that shapes our lives.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Scientific Reviewing was established in 1977 through a gift from Annual Reviews together with the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science, in honor of our founder J. Murray Luck – we are proud to currently sponsor it entirely.

This prestigious award – two recipients have gone on to win the National Medal of Science and another two the Nobel Prize – has been presented annually since 1979 to recognize authors, whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course of scientific thought. The field rotates among biological, physical, and social sciences.

The NAS dome depicts an early 20th Century view of Science. Photo credit: Dan W Bailey.

We’re delighted that Sergio Verdú, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, will receive the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing on May 1st 2016 at their stunning building in Washington D.C., presented this year in computer science. Our President and Editor-In-Chief, Richard Gallagher (current) and Samuel Gubins (former) will attend the ceremony. 

Sergio won “For consistent and distinguished contributions of review material in information theory, and for a leading role in developing high-quality review journals covering broad areas of the information sciences”. He is a leader in information theory, has contributed numerous books, monographs, book chapters, and review papers, many of which have become essential reading for those working in information and communication theory.

This award serves to highlight the value that review articles add to the research community. Reading one is like being transported into the laboratory of the leading scientists in the area, who explain what’s going on in the field. Readers come away with a richer understanding than they could gain in any other way and this is why Annual Reviews is a treasured resource.

Note: The 2017 NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing will be for contributions in the field of Criminology. Nominations must be submitted online no later than 11:59 pm EDT on Monday, October 3, 2016, so register today and share your pick.