At the JCB, peer review of submitted manuscripts is supervised by active scientists, ensuring the highest standard, timeliness, and relevance to the field of our published papers. As submission numbers in particular areas fluctuate and new areas of cell biology emerge, so too the composition of our Editorial Board adjusts.
We thank our Board members for their dedication and commitment. Their experience and passion for cell biology ensures that your paper is in the best possible hands during the review process.
Ramanujan Hegde earned his MD and PhD from UCSF in 1999 before becoming an Investigator at the NIH. Since his first days in graduate school, Manu has been fascinated by the maturation and quality control of secretory and membrane proteins. His research has two interrelated goals. The first is to understand the mechanistic and regulatory principles underlying protein localization and maturation. The second is to elucidate the means by which cells deal with inevitable inefficiencies in these biosynthetic pathways, and the consequences for disease when such quality control mechanisms fail. He is currently pursuing these goals as a Senior Investigator in the Cell Biology and Metabolism Program of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Thomas Langer's research focuses on various cellular mechanisms ensuring mitochondrial quality control and their protective roles against neurodegeneration and aging. His laboratory established molecular principles of membrane protein turnover by energy-dependent AAA proteases, discovered regulatory functions of these enzymes for mitochondrial protein and phospholipid biogenesis, and provided evidence for the pathogenic mechanisms of different neurodegenerative disorders associated with mutations in AAA protease subunits. Current interests include various mitochondrial proteases as well as prohibitin ring complexes and their role as putative membrane scaffolds. He received his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich after working at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, New York, on chaperone-mediated protein folding. He did postdoctoral studies at the LMU before he became full professor in 2001 at the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne.
Danny Schnell’s research focuses on chloroplast biogenesis in plants with an emphasis on protein targeting and assembly. His interest in protein trafficking began during his postdoctoral work with Günter Blobel at the Rockefeller University. These studies laid the foundation for the discovery of the TOC–TIC pathways that mediate the import of nucleus-encoded proteins into chloroplasts. Much of the research in his laboratory continues to focus on the molecular mechanisms of the TOC–TIC molecular machines. More recently, his interests have expanded to include studies of the regulatory functions of the protein import machinery, with particular interest in how multiple import pathways coordinate protein targeting with changes in gene expression that accompany stress, physiological, and developmental events. These studies demonstrate that the protein import apparatus contributes to the network of chloroplast–nuclear communication that is essential to maintain organelle homeostasis. Danny is currently a faculty member and Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Tamotsu Yoshimori received his PhD degree in Medical Science from Osaka University (Yoshio Okada). He has worked at Kansai Medical University (Yutaka Tashiro), EMBL (Kai Simons), NIBB (Yoshinori Ohsumi), NIG, RIMD of Osaka University, and is now a Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine and of Frontier Bioscience, Osaka University. His research interests are focused on intracellular membrane trafficking, and especially for the last decade, autophagy. He identified LC3 as an autophagosome-binding protein, and this protein is widely used as the gold standard in autophagy assays. His group also provided new insights on the molecular mechanisms of membrane dynamics and biogenesis in autophagy and the role of autophagy in pathogen defense. He is currently the head of a team-based MEXT project titled “Intracellular Logistics” involving about 40 laboratories studying membrane traffic, has served on MEXT and other agencies for grand reviews, and is on the editorial board of several prominent journals.
