Seeking a new Executive Editor for Development

Back in the summer of 2011, I was just finishing up work for the day. Sitting in my office at EMBO in Heidelberg, Germany, I happened to open up the Node for a quick scroll before heading home. And there I spotted a post advertising the vacant position of Executive Editor at Development. I wasn’t looking for a new job – I had been at The EMBO Journal for less than three years and I was very happy there, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. I’d published my first ever paper in Development, I knew and loved the journal and I missed thinking about developmental biology – we didn’t get many submissions from the field at EMBOJ. Plus my sister had just had a baby and there was an attraction to moving back to the UK and being closer to my family. The application deadline was just a few days away, but I scrabbled to brush up my CV, write a decent cover letter and get them sent off. The rest, as they say, is history, and I’ve now been fortunate enough to hold the position of Executive Editor at Development for over 13 years.

I can honestly say that it’s been the best job in the world – I get to work with a fantastic in-house team of dedicated editors, administrators, production staff and more, and with a wonderful group of Academic Editors who somehow manage to juggle their editorial work alongside their full-time academic responsibilities. I’ve worked a lot on (hopefully!) improving some of our policies, processes and workflows at the journal, and I’ve been able to kick-start new initiatives from the journal, like our series of human development meetings and the Pathway to Independence programme. I’ve developed a wide network of contacts and friends in the developmental biology community, and I’ve loved hearing about all the fantastic science going on in the field.

Soon, however, it will be time for me to move on. Fortunately, I’m not going far – I’ll be taking up a new role at The Company of Biologists that has arisen due to some internal structural reorganisation, where I’ll be working strategically across all our journals. I’m delighted to be able to further my career in publishing while staying with an organisation in whose aims and ethos I deeply believe, though I’m gutted to be moving away from the developmental biology community.

All this means that my job is up for grabs. So, on the off-chance that someone like the me-of-13-years-ago happens to be reading this post, we’re looking for an experienced professional editor with a love of developmental biology to take on this role. Full details can be found in the job advert, and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about this position.

While I’m going to find it hard to ‘let go’ of the journal after so many years, I’m excited to see what new ideas my replacement will bring to Development so that the journal continues to flourish going forwards.

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