Professor Simon Cherry, Biomedical Engineering

Professor Simon Cherry has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of the journal, “Physics in Medicine and Biology”. The journal is one of the top-ranked biomedical engineering journals.  This brings to two the number of top-ranked biomedical engineering journals housed in the UC Davis Biomedical Engineering Department. Professor and Chair Kyriacos Athanasiou  is Editor-in-Chief of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, the flagship journal of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Published by IOP Publishing on behalf of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, PMB covers the application of practical and theoretical physics to medicine and biology, and is especially concerned with cutting-edge research in the areas of radiotherapy physics and medical imaging.

Professor Cherry, who is also the Director of the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging at the University of California, Davis, has already made an outstanding contribution to PMB, publishing 40 papers in the journal, averaging over 40 citations per paper, and spending eight years on its Editorial Board.

Outside of publishing, Professor Cherry has been elected fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has been honored with an Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research award by UC Davis. He is also the newest recipient of Society for Molecular Imaging’s prestigious “Imaging Achievement Award.”

He said, ‘I am honored and delighted to be taking over as Editor-in-Chief of PMB, a journal in which I have been publishing regularly for the past 22 years.’

Professor Cherry takes over the role, as of January 1, 2012, from Professor Steve Webb, who leaves the position having done an impressive job taking the publication forward, with the journal’s Impact Factor rising above 3.0 and record levels of submissions being received.

‘The journal, under the outstanding leadership of its previous editor, has been on a strongly upward trajectory. My responsibility is to ensure that we continue to attract the very best papers across our broad and dynamic field, and provide the very best service possible to our authors and our readers by communicating the most important scientific advances quickly and accurately,’ said Cherry.

‘Simon Cherry is PMB’s first Editor to be based in the USA and in a way this may put an end to any last vestiges of thought that PMB is anything but an international journal. I shall miss PMB enormously and I wish Simon Cherry and the whole team good luck for a glittering future,” said Professor Webb.

Professor Cherry’s experienced research background makes him a natural fit to lead PMB. His primary research area is the rapidly growing field of molecular imaging, with a focus on positron emission tomography (PET) and its application to small-animal preclinical imaging.

He is also involved in exploring the integration of PET imaging technology with the high-resolution anatomical imaging provided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as well as the development of optical imaging techniques such as Cerenkov luminescence imaging.