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New editor-in-chief P. Scott Carney makes some opening remarks and comments on special OSA Centennial activities this year at JOSA A.
© 2015 Optical Society of America
1. NEW JOSA A EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
I am pleased and honored to be the seventh editor-in-chief of JOSA A. It seems Sylvester McCoy was unavailable. My predecessors, Robert Terhune (’83–’84), Harrison Barrett (’85–’91), Bahaa Saleh (’91–’97), James Fienup (’98–’03), Stephen Burns (’04–’09), and Franco Gori (’10–’15), have set a high bar for leadership and vision at JOSA A. I am grateful to the Board of Editors for entrusting me with the stewardship of that legacy, and I hope to earn the trust of you, our authors and readers.
JOSA A is my journal. As a student at the University of Rochester, JOSA A was the first journal I would grab in the morning in the physics library. It has been home to some of my favorite papers. I chose JOSA A for my first first-author paper [1]. It continues to be my choice [2].
The work of Franco Gori was mandatory reading in my group in grad school. Shortly after the invention of the laser, Franco built the first one in Italy and immediately started investigating the radical coherence properties of the new device [3]. This was soon followed by his first article in JOSA [4], and, decades later, the JOSA A papers I would be studying [5–7]. He has continued to choose JOSA A, contributing another 13 papers since then.
They say you should not meet your heroes. In this case, they were wrong. I joined the editorial team at JOSA A in 2010. The last six years have been tremendously rewarding, professionally and personally, in no small part because of the opportunity to work with Franco. In that time he has assembled an incredible team of topical editors, with whom I have had the pleasure to serve. They volunteer untold hours of their time, and spend immeasurable energy making hard editorial decisions. Franco is handing over to me the Journal on an exciting trajectory, and I am deeply grateful.
2. CENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS
Before JOSA A and B there was JOSA. First published in 1917, it was simply the Journal of the Optical Society of America, a society formed just the year before. The very first article in the very first issue [8] reads like a charter for us today, calling for a society to promote applied scientific research, celebrating the rise of science as a profession, and seeking to build a community. Things change, things remain, and here we are almost a century later.
This year we will be contributing to a celebration of OSA’s Centennial with a series of special activities at JOSA A and B. A special JOSA website helping to celebrate the Centennial will be launched featuring a variety of new and historical content from JOSA and its spinoffs JOSA A and JOSA B. To honor and thank those who have helped to guide the journal since its inception, we will have a special section dedicated to all current and former editors-in-chief and topical editors. Additionally, we will be publishing several Editor’s Pick article collections that will highlight papers from key topical areas in JOSA A, and we will have special invited perspective pieces appearing in JOSA A by some of our most influential authors. I hope we will live up to the charge given us by Richtmyer and continue to stimulate research, build our community, and celebrate our profession.
All of these activities require extra time and commitment on the part of our authors, our professional staff, and our topical editors. I am so thankful for all of the work they do. I am especially indebted to former JOSA A editor-in-chief, and founding editor of Advances in Optics and Photonics, Bahaa Saleh, who has, in Taftian style, returned to JOSA A to serve as special Centennial editor for 2016. Bahaa has recruited our perspectives authors, led the compilation of our Editor’s Pick collections, and provided invaluable advice to me.
Looking forward to the coming year and to my tenure as editor-in-chief, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity, gratitude for the team of professionals and volunteers who make it all happen, gratitude for our authors, and gratitude for our readers, who continue to make our work relevant. As always, I welcome and value the comments and suggestions of our readers.
Editor-in-Chief, JOSA A
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
REFERENCES
1. P. S. Carney, E. Wolf, and G. S. Agrawal, “Statistical generalizations of the optical cross-section theorem with application to inverse scattering,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 14, 3366–3367 (1997). [CrossRef]
2. B. Deutsch, R. Reddy, D. Mayerich, R. Bhargava, and P. S. Carney, “Compositional prior information in computed infrared spectroscopic imaging,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 32, 1126–1131 (2015). [CrossRef]
3. M. Bertolotti, B. Daino, F. Gori, and D. Sette, “Coherence properties of a laser beam,” Il Nuovo Cimento X, 1505–1514 (1965).
4. M. Bertolotti, F. Gori, and G. Guattari, “Coherence requirements in holography,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. 57, 1526–1529 (1967). [CrossRef]
5. P. D. Santis, F. Gori, G. Guattari, and C. Palma, “Synthesis of partially coherent fields,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 3, 1258–1262 (1986). [CrossRef]
6. E. Wolf, J. T. Foley, and F. Gori, “Frequency shifts of spectral lines produced by scattering from spatially random media,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 6, 1142–1149 (1989). [CrossRef]
7. F. Gori, M. Santarsiero, and G. Guattari, “Coherence and the spatial distribution of intensity,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 10, 673–679 (1993). [CrossRef]
8. F. K. Richtmyer, “Opportunities for research,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. 1, 1–3 (1917). [CrossRef]