In an impressive ceremony held in Washington, DC this past Wednesday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice-president of the United States. In the world of academic publishing there has also been a changing of the guard, and we are delighted to report that Professor Tania Douglas, co-founder and board member of CapeRay, has just been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of the international journal, Medical Engineering & Physics (MEP). She succeeds Dr Richard Black of the University of Strathclyde in Scotland who has been at the helm for the past nine years.
MEP, which was launched in 1979 as the Journal of Biomedical Engineering and renamed in 1994, is owned by the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM) and published by Elsevier. The IPEM traces its history back to the Hospital Physicists Association (1943) and the Biological Engineering Society (1960) and included among its late fellows are two Nobel Laureates – Godfrey Hounsfield for computed tomography (1979), and Peter Mansfield for magnetic resonance imaging (2003). MEP has a two-year impact factor of 2.39 and is ranked among the leading journals in biomedical engineering.
Douglas (seen left) is a distinguished scholar in her own right and holds fellowships of the South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE), the University of Cape Town (UCT), and the International Academy for Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), in which she is one of only 17 women out of 163 fellows. Her research has focused on innovative applications of medical imaging to major public health problems in South Africa, and more recently on the development and implementation of health technologies that are appropriate for low-resource settings.
In her first editorial published this month, Douglas set the stage for her period in office, writing: “There remains a strong interest by authors and readers in computational modelling of physiological and biomechanical phenomena, the development and evaluation of medical devices, rehabilitation engineering, and biomedical imaging and signal processing. Our authors and expert reviewers ensure the journal’s ability to disseminate new knowledge [and] contribute to the journal’s reputation as a venue of choice for the publication of work on the application of physics and engineering for improved health care.”
In 2019, MEP celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special issue and CapeRay’s CEO, Kit Vaughan, contributed an article entitled “Novel imaging approaches to screen for breast cancer: Recent advances and future prospects.” We are confident that under Tania Douglas’s stewardship, MEP is poised to go from strength to strength.