Welcoming Emily Baird and Philipp Lehmann to the JEB editorial team

Abstract

Emily Baird (left, photo credit: Simon Hastegård) and Philipp Lehmann (right, photo credit: Patrick Geßner)Journal of Experimental Biology has sometimes been likened to a family. With a strong sense of community, the journal welcomes scientists who care about understanding the creatures that they work with. At the heart of the journal is the team of committed Monitoring Editors that oversees peer review of the research submitted to the journal. With backgrounds from comparative physiology, biomechanics and neuroethology, the Editors are well qualified to nurture manuscripts as they proceed to publication, resulting in the robust research that is the hallmark of the journal. We are welcoming two new members to the group of Monitoring Editors: neuroethologist Emily Baird, from Stockholm University, Sweden; and insect physiologist Philipp Lehmann from University of Greifswald, Germany, to strengthen and enhance the expertise that is central to the journal's success.‘I felt extremely honoured when I was invited to join JEB's editorial team, not only because it gives me the opportunity to help uphold the integrity of the journal…but also to be able to give back to the academic community and research leaders of the future’, says Baird, whose career began in her home country of Australia. Growing up on a farm 30 km from Canberra, Baird was surrounded by domesticated and wild animals from an early age, developing a passion for natural history. Arriving at the Australian National University as a combined Arts and Science undergraduate, covering philosophy and biology, Baird went on to major in neuroscience to pursue her interest in the brain. During this time, she was inspired by a course on the neural basis of behaviour, taught by Cobie Brinkman, and when she came to select her Honours research project, there was only one option for her: the opportunity to investigate how honeybees use vision to control their flight with Mandyam Srinivasan and Shaowu Zhang. ‘I had not previously considered working with insects’, she admits, but the decision sealed Baird's fate. Her undergraduate degree extended into a PhD in Srinivasan and Zhang's lab resulting in a publication in JEB (Baird et al., 2005), which has gone on to inspire autonomous robot control systems (Roubieu et al., 2014).In 2008, Baird made the bold decision to leave Australia and head to Lund, Sweden, where she joined Eric Warrant and Marie Dacke. There she continued studying bee flight, but she also branched out to learn about dung beetle navigation in South Africa and nocturnal beetle flight control in Panama. ‘The most elaborate experiment that I have been involved in was related to studying whether dung beetles could use the Milky Way to orient’, says Baird, describing how she and her colleagues, Dacke, Warrant and Marcus Byrne, set up a lab in the planetarium at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, displaying different constellations to the beetles to find out how they could navigate a perfectly straight line using the night sky. ‘We found that the beetles could orient under the projected Milky Way’, says Baird (Dacke et al., 2013), recalling that this remarkable discovery also earned the researchers a coveted Ig Nobel Prize in 2013. After setting up her first lab at the University of Lund, Baird moved to Stockholm University, Sweden, in 2018 as a Senior Lecturer, switching focus to learn more about the impact of the environment on insect sensory systems. Reflecting on her 20 year association with the journal, Baird has always found JEB to be fair, adding that the research published in the journal has been a cornerstone for her own studies. And as she embarks on her new role, she says that she is looking forward to upholding the journal's integrity and reputation, ‘values that I have appreciated as an author and a reviewer’, she says.Also joining the JEB fold in 2025, Philipp Lehmann is looking forward to learning more about the fantastic work currently going on in t