We are delighted to announce the Committee for the first Frontiers Spotlight Award, which will provide US$ 100,000 to a group of researchers to organise a conference on the subject of their Frontiers Research Topic. They will select – from a shortlist of 10 finalists – an editorial team behind an outstanding Frontiers Research Topic that closed in year 2016, judging on scientific and editorial excellence, international reach, subject novelty, and interdisciplinarity.

The Topic Editors who receive The Spotlight Award will be invited to organize an international scientific conference on their Topic, to be held at the SwissTech Convention Center on the campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland early in 2018. The award covers the costs for the venue, as well as the the registration, travel, and lodging of the Topic Editors and speakers, conference fees for all contributing authors, and conference promotion.

More than 400 outstanding Research Topics published in 2016 are eligible for the Award, in subject areas across our comprehensive editorial program of 58 journals, ranging from microbiology to sociology. Our Committee will be invited to evaluate a shortlist of 10 topics, which will be pre-selected based on Frontiers advanced metrics, including article-level metrics, author-level impact metrics, and Altmetric scores.

The members of the jury for the first annual Frontiers Spotlight Award are:

Dr Chen Dong – Professor and Director of the Institute for Immunology and Dean of the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Among his many awards are the Pfizer-Showell Award from the American Association of Immunologists (2001), the Milstein Young Investigator Award from the International Society of Interferon and Cytokine Research (2004), the American Lung Association Career Investigator Award (2007), the MD Anderson Cancer Center Faculty Scholar Award in Research (2008), and the AAI-BD Biosciences Investigator Award from the American Association of Immunologists (2009). He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and rated a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Dong has been the Specialty Chief Editor of the section T Cell biology in Frontiers in Immunology since 2016.

Dr Amanda G. Fisher – Director of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Head of Institute of Clinical Sciences at Imperial College London. Professor Fisher was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2001, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2003, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. Other awards she received include the EMBO Gold Medal (2002), the Women of Outstanding Achievement in Science, Engineering and Technology award (2010), and the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres International Fellow Award (2014). Fisher has been the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology since 2015.

Dr Cecilia Giulivi  – Professor at the University of California, Davis in 2004 and since 2007 in the Department of Molecular Biosciences. Professor Giulivi has been a member of the MIND Institute since 2011.She has been a Member of Executive Board for Mitochondria in Physiology and a Member of the Editorial Board for the Journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine since 2004. In 2011, she was appointed as a Reviewer in the Medical Research Council, as well as ad-hoc reviewer for several NIH study sections. Guilivi received Autism Science’s Top 10 Achievement Award for 2010. She has been the Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Chemistry since 2013.

Dr Joshua L. Heazlewood – Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow in the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne. Formerly an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam-Golm (2007), and Director of Plant Systems Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2008-2014), he was appointed to his current position in 2014. He has served as the Specialty Chief Editor of the section Plant Proteomics in Frontiers in Plant Science since 2010 and the Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Plant Science since 2016.

Dr Isabelle Peretz – Professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair and Casavant Chair in Neurocognition of Music, and Founding co-Director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS). Her many awards include the IPSEN Foundation’s Neuronal Plasticity Prize (2011) and the Excellence Prize from le Fonds de recherche du Québec (Nature et Technologies) (2015). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Psychological Association. Together with Dr Robert J. Zatorre, co-Director of BRAMS, Peretz has been Specialty Chief Editor of the section Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience in Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Neuroscience since 2010.

Dr Sidney A. Simon – Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. Until his emeritate in 2015 he was Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University Medical Center (from 1998) and Professor at the Department of Physiology of Duke University (from 1988). In 2002 Simon was elected a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Science. He is Chief Editor of the CRC Press book series Frontiers in Neuroscience and co-Editor of the Elsevier book series Current Topics in Membranes. He has co-edited five books, including “Frontiers and New Methods in Chemosensory Research”, “Peptide-Lipid Interactions”, and “The Nociceptive Membrane”. Simon has been Specialty Chief Editor of Frontiers in Integrative Neurosciencesince 2007.

Dr Izuru Takewaki – Professor at Kyoto University Graduate School of Engineering, Japan. He is a Fellow of the Wessex Institute of Technology and a Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, and the Architectural Institute of Japan. From 2013 to 2015, he was Vice-President of the Architectural Institute of Japan. He has written five books, including “Critical Excitation Methods in Earthquake Engineering”, “Building Control with Passive Dampers”, and “System Identification for Structural Health Monitoring”. Takewaki has been Specialty Chief Editor of Earthquake Engineering Section since 2014 and Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Built Environment since 2015.

Frontiers warmly thanks the seven members of the jury and wishes them every success. We look forward to announcing the winning Topic Editors in March 2017 – stay tuned.

Visit our Spotlight Award website for more information.