After 14 years, we are sad to announce that Raul Suarez is stepping down as an Editor of Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) at the end of March 2019. Hans Hoppeler, Editor-in-Chief, who appointed Suarez in 2005, says, ‘Raul brought his enormously broad cross-species understanding of comparative physiology, with a particular strength in biochemistry and metabolic control, to the journal. He had a distinct and considerate voice in all matters pertaining to the well-being and development of JEB’. Reflecting on his time with the journal, Suarez highlights the annual journal symposium as an event that he appreciated attending regularly. ‘I learned so much about so many things at those meetings’, says Suarez, adding that the events provided a great opportunity to build strong friendships with the other members of the Editorial team and journal staff.
After graduating from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines with a Biology degree, Suarez recalls how he horrified his mother by refusing to go to medical school. He chose instead to attend the even more liberal University of the Philippines to study Zoology. Having focused on fish reproductive physiology for his Master's degree, Suarez applied to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada to work with one of the leading figures in the field, Bill Hoar. However, the reply came that Hoar was retiring and no longer accepting graduate students. ‘Peter Hochachka, who had been in the Philippines a year earlier on a research expedition, saw my application and invited me to do a PhD in comparative biochemistry and physiology with him’, says Suarez, recalling how the decision entirely changed the course of his life. After 4 happy years in Vancouver, Suarez and his young family returned to the Philippines, but life under the Marcos regime was intolerable. He soon left, moving his family to California for a brief postdoc at Stanford Medical Center, before returning to Canada in 1984. ‘Peter Hochachka hired me to run his lab [in Vancouver] as a Research Associate’, says Suarez, remembering how Hochachka gave him the freedom to pursue his passion for energy metabolism in hummingbirds. Suarez then made the difficult decision to commute between his family, which was settled in Vancouver by then, and California when he joined the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1995. There, he continued working on hummingbirds, but expanded his research programme to address the question of how flying insects achieve higher metabolic rates than hummingbirds, while also investigating metabolic scaling and the relationships between biochemical capacities and maximum physiological requirements.
Since retiring from his UCSB teaching responsibilities in 2017, Suarez has returned to Vancouver, where he confesses to ‘dabbling’ in environmental history. ‘I am focusing on the Philippines and I am interested in the historical development of social institutions and how these have affected the environment’, he says. He also comments that he will miss his role as a JEB Editor, helping to maintain the journal's stature as an outlet for rigorous interesting and exciting leading-edge work.
With Raul's departure, we are delighted to welcome Trish Schulte, also at UBC, as the newest member of the JEB Editorial team. Having previously co-edited Physiological and Biochemical Zoology with JEB Editor Katie Gilmour, Schulte admits that she was a little daunted when the invitation from Hoppeler arrived. ‘But then my next thought was how much I like JEB and that I want to support it in any way that I can’, she says.
Despite Schulte's success as a leading comparative physiologist, she did not set out to be a biologist. ‘My mother was a chemist, and then a chemistry teacher, and she encouraged my interest in science from the time I was very young. So when I went to university, my plan was to either do physical chemistry… or do chemical engineering’. However, Bill Milsom put paid to Schulte's plans. Describing his Principles of Biology class as ‘truly inspiring’, Schulte quickly realised that she wanted to switch major and says, ‘I have loved the integrative nature of comparative physiology ever since’. Having completed several research projects as a Zoology undergraduate, Schulte joined Hochachka's lab as a Master's student before moving to Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Laboratory to study the processes of adaptive evolution of gene regulation in Atlantic killifish with Dennis Powers for her PhD. ‘Peter Hochachka and George Somero have been my most influential and inspiring mentors’, she says, adding, ‘They also taught me that science, and especially comparative physiology and biochemistry, can be enormous fun’. Since returning to UBC in 2001, Schulte has supervised 11 postdoctoral fellows, 15 PhD students and numerous Master's and undergraduate students; ‘As you may guess from the numbers, I really love working with students and postdocs’, she chuckles, adding, ‘the energy and new ideas they bring are the real secret to the success of my research programme’.
Recalling her earliest interactions with JEB as an undergraduate and then Master's student, Schulte says, ‘The first paper from my MSc thesis was published in JEB and I remember it as being an extremely positive experience’, in contrast to previous encounters with other journals, which she remembers were harrowing. Having published 25 Research Articles in JEB and two Reviews over her 27 year career, Schulte says that she is now looking forward to seeing ‘the super-cool work that is being submitted to JEB. I love the diversity of science that appears in the journal. It is always exciting to me to learn more about the natural world’.
With the current team of Editors covering the spectrum of JEB's broad scope, Hoppeler feels that the journal's focus maintains its position as the leading journal in comparative physiology while supporting the experimental biology community during this time of rapid change in the publishing industry.
