A little over a year ago, the virus that causes COVID-19 started to disrupt many aspects of life on a worldwide scale. Naturally, this also applied, and still applies, to JOSA B. One would think that the lockdown of research institutions and universities in many countries would lead to corresponding reductions in the numbers of submitted manuscripts. Think again. With the exception of a few feature issue schedules that had to be shifted because they were tied to correspondingly shifted conferences, the number of submissions to JOSA B has remained remarkably stable.

In fact, the problems lay (and lie) elsewhere. While much of the time-critical work of managing the Journal and the peer review process can be done from home, OSA staff members, topical editors, and reviewers alike have had to deal with numerous issues such as homeschooling their children, bandwidth limitations of their internet connections, and significant additional efforts related to online teaching.

It is, therefore, with great humility that I wish to express my sincere gratitude to those individuals for their quite remarkable and selfless efforts to keep the Journal on a steady course throughout these woeful times. Collectively, they have managed to keep the average time to publication at its pre-pandemic level while maintaining JOSA B’s high acceptance standards.

Let me illustrate the above by way of example. A few months ago, the second and final three-year terms of several topical editors were about to come to an end. I started to look for new editors who would compensate for the imminent loss of expertise and would strengthen the Journal’s coverage in a number of topical areas where we receive many submissions. Exactly at that time, the second wave of the pandemic was building, so I knew I had a daunting task ahead of me. Who would want to commit considerable time and precious energy during such times on a voluntary basis? I was pleasantly surprised! Essentially all those approached graciously agreed to join the editorial team. Not only that, there were also two topical editors, Qingqing Liang and Andrey Sukhorukov, who agreed to renew for second three-year terms.

I would like to take this opportunity to welcome and introduce the newest members of the editorial board, who have quickly and efficiently joined the rest of the JOSA B editorial board in collectively providing quality peer review and maintaining JOSA B’s high standards. I would also like to acknowledge the current members for their continued dedication. Thank you all very much!

Topical Editors

Esben Andersen

Specialty Optical Fibers, Wave-front Shaping, Spatial and Modal Multiplexing, and Optical Communication

Esben Ravn Andresen received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He completed postdoctoral work at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Institut Fresnel, Marseille, France. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Lille, France. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed journal papers and is a co-inventor on five patents. His research interests include applications of novel optical fibers, wave-front shaping, coherent optical communications, modal multiplexing, and fiber-optic endoscopy.

Xue-Wen Chen

Optical Devices, Nano-Optics, Plasmonics, Spectroscopy

Xue-Wen Chen received his B. Eng. and Ph.D. in optical engineering both from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. His postdoctoral experience at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and as research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Germany, brought him into the fields of nano-optics and single-molecule spectroscopy. He was a visiting scholar at Ginzton Laboratory of Stanford University, USA, before joining Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, as National Scholar (young) and Professor of Physics. His independent research includes theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies of extreme nano-optics and quantum nanophotonics.

Natalia Korolkova

Quantum Optics Theory/Quantum Information Theory

Natalia Korolkova is a Professor at the University of St Andrews, UK, and group leader of the Theoretical Quantum Information group. Natalia received her Ph.D. in theoretical quantum optics from Moscow State University, Russia, before being appointed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Optics, Palacky University, Czech Republic, in the field of quantum statistics of light fields, non-classical light, and quantum cryptography. She joined the Quantum Metrology group at Erlangen University, Germany, and then led the Quantum Information group at the Center of Modern Optics there. Her expertise lies in quantum information processing using quantum continuous variables of light and matter as well as in studies of quantum correlations, open quantum systems, quantum state reconstruction, and quantum communication.

Christopher Poulton

Theoretical Nano-photonics, Metamaterials, Plasmonics, Transformation Optics

Chris Poulton is a Professor in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia, for work on electromagnetic and elastodynamic wave propagation in periodic materials, he was appointed Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Liverpool, UK, where he researched analytical models of photonic and phononic crystals. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for High-frequency and Quantum Electronics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, he worked with experimentalists to develop integrated nonlinear devices before joining the Max Planck Research Group (photonics and new materials) in Erlangen, Germany, to study plasmonic interactions and guidance in photonic crystal fibers. His area of research is theoretical photonics, specializing in numerical and analytical methods in electromagnetic wave propagation in complex materials. His recent research includes work on Brillouin scattering, metamaterials, and nonlinear interactions in nanophotonics.

Li Qian

Quantum Optics and Quantum Communication

Li Qian is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her early research focused on photonic devices for high-speed optical communications. As a senior scientist at Corning, Inc., she led the development of commercial extended L-band erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. After joining the faculty at the University of Toronto, she started experimental research in fiber-based quantum cryptosystems, and she and her collaborators demonstrated a decoy-state QKD system and conducted research in quantum random number generation, and measurement-device-independent QKD and twin-field QKD systems. She also developed fiber-based entangled photon pair sources based on periodically poled silica fibers. She is now working toward a hyper-entangled photon source with tunable properties in multiple degrees of freedom. She has published more than 200 journal and conference papers. She is the recipient of an Early Career Award at the University of Toronto in 2003 and a Premier’s Research Excellence Award (PREA) by the Premier of Ontario in 2004, and she was awarded the Canada Research Chair in 2006.

Xiaodi Tan

Holography and Diffractive Optics

Xiaodi Tan obtained a Master’s degree from the Optical Engineering Department of the Beijing Institute of Technology, China, and a Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan. He worked as a Senior Engineer of the Technology Division at OPTWARE Corporation, Japan, and was a Senior Technology Analyst, Distinguished Engineer, and Optical Technology Manager at SONY Corporation. After serving as Professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, he became Professor at Fujian Normal University, China. His research interests are in holography and diffractive optics. He is a Senior Member of The Optical Society (OSA), a Fellow of The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and Director of the Chinese Optical Society (COS) and Chinese Society for Optical Engineering (CSOE).

Assistant Topical Editor

Christos Tserkezis

Christos Tserkezis obtained his Masters’s degree in Physics of Materials from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He also received his Ph.D. there, supported by a Heracleitus II fellowship on the topic of plasmonic photonic crystals and metamaterials. He joined the Donostia International Physics Center and the Center for Materials Physics, in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, as a postdoctoral fellow and later received a Marie Curie Cofund postdoctoral fellowship from the Technical University of Denmark. He moved to the University of Southern Denmark as a VILLUM postdoctoral fellow and has since become an Assistant Professor of Theoretical Condensed-Matter Physics there. He has published approximately 60 peer-reviewed articles in international journals. His work is focused on nanophotonics, plasmonics, light–matter interactions at the nanoscale, and condensed-matter physics. He is a Senior Member of The Optical Society (OSA).