Looking back at 2023

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Abstract

The Nanoscale Horizons Editorial Board and Editorial Office look back at 2023 and give an overview of the exciting events, activities and news for the journal from the last year.

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The end of the year is one of the best times for reflection and as we come to the close of 2023, we are taking time to look back at some of the exciting initiatives, events, activities, and news from Nanoscale Horizons over the last 12 months. We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to the nano community for their energy and engagement, which has enabled the journal to continue to support our growing community. We look forward to another great year for the journal in 2024.

The year started well for Nanoscale Horizons, with Professor Katsuhiko Ariga (National Institute for Materials Science, Japan) joining the Editorial Board as a Scientific Editor and Dr Miaofang Chi (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA) and Professor Jin-Hong Park (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea) (Fig. 1) being welcomed shortly after as new members of the journal's Editorial Board.

Fig. 1 Our new Editorial Board members. Photos (left to right) of Katsuhiko Ariga, Miaofang Chi and Jin-Hong Park.

To mark International Women's Day 2023, we highlighted some of the fantastic female researchers publishing impactful work in nanoscience in a themed collection celebrating women in nanoscience. This cross-journal collection showcased a selection of the work published in Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances led by female scientists around the world and highlights the impact these leading individuals have on the research published within our nanoscience journals.

We were delighted to announce Seung Hwan Ko and his team, Ester Segal and her team, and Jordi Arbiol and his team as the winners of our 2022 Outstanding Paper Awards earlier this year. These annual awards recognize some of the outstanding work published in the journal, as well as all the authors behind these exceptional articles.

We also recognized the significant contributions that our reviewers have made to the journal by highlighting the 2022 Outstanding Reviewers for Nanoscale Horizons. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all reviewers for Nanoscale Horizons and acknowledge their incredible support and the dedication of their time to providing high-quality, timely and helpful reports on submissions to the journal.

This year saw the continuation of our Emerging Investigator series, which showcases the exceptional work published by early-career (i.e., less than ten years post-PhD) researchers in the journal. The series continues to regularly highlight the corresponding author of a recently published Communication article through an interview-style Editorial and this year we featured interviews with 8 early-career researchers (Fig. 2). If you are eligible and interested in submitting a paper for potential inclusion in the series, please contact the Editorial office (E-mail: nanoscalehorizons-rsc@rsc.org) for details.

Fig. 2 Our 2023 Emerging Investigators. Photos (left to right) of (top) Kayoko Kobayashi, Ran Long, Saptarshi Das and Luciano Colazzo; (bottom) Christoph Wolf, Yujeong Bae, Ahu Gümrah Dumanli-Parry and Shalini Singh.

Our Community Board provides a platform for early career researchers to share their experiences and ideas on scientific publishing. Over the summer, we requested nominations from the nanoscience academic community and were thrilled with the high calibre of candidates put forward. We were delighted to appoint 27 new members (Fig. 3) who, together with continuing members, make up a Community Board of 50 international researchers at different stages of their early careers, ranging from PhD candidates to Professors.

Fig. 3 Our new Community Board members. Photos (left to right) of (top) Amina Benchohra, Fangfang Cao, Yihuang Chen, Dennis Christensen, Didem Dede, Sara Domenici, Jingshan Du, Yuan Fang and Susel Del Sol Fernández; (middle) Minjeong Ha, Xue Han, Taskeen Janjua, Meysam Keshavarz, Yoonseob Kim, Zhiwei Li, Chunchun Li, Albert Liu and Jette Mathiesen; (bottom) Dinesh Mullangi, Michael B. Ross, Tracy Schloemer, Qianqian Shi, Jaime Andres Perez Taborda, Chao Wang, Zhenhua Wu, Akiko Yagi and Jiandong Yao.

Working with our Community Board we launched a new series of Community Board Picks, short article summaries highlighting the most recent advances in nanoscience and sharing our Community Board's unique expertise.

We were delighted to be able to meet with some of our Board members in person at the Royal Society of Chemistry's headquarters in London for our annual Editorial Board meeting (Fig. 4), while others provided their contributions remotely. Lots of exciting plans were discussed and we are looking forward to sharing some of these with you over the next year.

Fig. 4 Members of the Nanoscale Horizons Editorial Board and Editorial Office outside the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, featuring (left to right) Wenlong Cheng, Dirk Guldi, Ed Gardner, Michaela Mühlberg, Alex Metherell, Katharina Landfester, Heather Montgomery, Hemna Fathima and Chris Dias.

The first Horizons symposium, organized by Nanoscale Horizons and Materials Horizons, was held in Berlin, Germany earlier this year and showcased a wide variety of cutting-edge work in the areas of electronic and photonic materials, and materials for energy applications, with chemists, physicists and materials scientists presenting their most outstanding work (Fig. 5). We were delighted to arrange such a successful conference and look forward to sharing the details of our 2024 edition with you next year. We hope to see you there.

Fig. 5 The poster session at the Horizons symposium.

2023 was a particularly notable year for nanoscience with the award of the Chemistry Nobel Prize to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery, synthesis, and development of quantum dots. This recognition has been long awaited and to celebrate this outstanding achievement in nanoscience and colloidal chemistry we put together a themed collection of articles published over the last 10 years on quantum dots, including several articles from Nobel Prize winner Professor Bawendi himself.

We would also like to take this opportunity to share some of the personal achievements, successes, and highlights from our Editorial Board over the last year.

First, we are delighted to share that Professor Katsuhiko Ariga, Dr Miaofang Chi, Professor Zhiyong Tang and Professor Jinlan Wang were included in Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers list. The Highly Cited Researchers™ is an annual program which recognizes those who have published several highly cited papers over the last ten years, and thereby have a wide and significant influence on their respective field.

It was also exciting to see Professor Katsuhiko Ariga featured on Japanese TV in a segment on self-assembly, explaining how physical and chemical processes can create order to form advanced structures.

Professor Yves Dufrêne's personal highlight for the year was the implementation of a correlated force and optical nanoscopy platform for biology in Belgium. He is excited about the prospects for this new AFM-STED nanoscopy platform in the Dufrêne–Alsteens group, which will allow them to understand biomolecular mechanisms in an unprecedented manner.

We would like to congratulate Professor Zhiyong Tang on his appointment as the new director of the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) in China. He looks forward to the challenges of this new role and to continuing the collaboration between NCNST and Nanoscale Horizons. As part of this ongoing partnership he was delighted to work on a special collection published in Nanoscale Horizons, Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances to celebrate the 20th anniversary of NCNST.

I think we all share Professor Katharina Landfester's feeling that it was a pleasure to meet with so many colleagues at conferences around the world this year and with 2024 just around the corner we are already looking forward to the upcoming events for the next year!

2024 also marks the 40th birthday of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and, as a director of the institute, Professor Landfester is looking forward to celebrating this significant milestone.

We are looking forward to seeing what 2024 has in store for nanoscience and to working with our new Editorial and Community Board members to support the nanoscience community in the best ways possible.

We all share Professor Tang's enjoyment at seeing both the high quality and international impact of publications in Nanoscale Horizons and look forward to continuing the journal's progress in the new year.

The new year also brings change, with Professor Wenlong Cheng relocating to join the University of Sydney in January 2024, where he looks forward to the new opportunities and experiences that will come with this move.

We have lots of exciting activities planned for next year and hope to have you with us along the way as we celebrate more rising stars in our Emerging Investigators series, more incredible research in our Outstanding Paper Awards, and offer a platform to feature more first-class work in the journal and at next year's Horizons symposium. We hope to meet with many of you over the coming year and wish you all the best for 2024.

 

Katharina Landfester, Editorial Board Chair

Katsuhiko Ariga, Scientific Editor

Wenlong Cheng, Scientific Editor

Miaofang Chi, Editorial Board Member

Yves Dufrêne, Scientific Editor

Anna Fontcuberta i Morral, Scientific Editor

Dirk Guldi, Scientific Editor

Jin-Hong Park, Editorial Board Member

Zhiyong Tang, Scientific Editor

Jinlan Wang, Scientific Editor

Miqin Zhang, Editorial Board Member

Michaela Mühlberg, Executive Editor

Heather Montgomery, Managing Editor

Edward Gardner, Development Editor

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