It is part of my vision for JOSA B to support the optics and photonics community by contributing to the professional development of early career researchers in the field. I think that the Journal can play a part in developing careful and critical reviewers (see OSA’s Reviewer Certification Course [1], for example) and by training the next generation of editors.

Along these lines, from 2011 to 2013, a few of the JOSA B topical editors mentored junior researchers as assistant editors. The mentors worked together with an assistant editor to select reviewers and make decisions on submitted manuscripts until the assistant editor was comfortable acting independently. I was one of the mentors and found the experience valuable and rewarding, and in fact, I maintain a professional connection with my mentee to this day.

My own positive experience coupled with my goals for the Journal have prompted me to reinstate this mentorship scheme. I’m pleased to introduce here two new assistant topical editors, Shuo Sun and Nahid Talebi. Current JOSA B topical editors Andrey Lavrinenko and Alfred U’Ren will serve as mentors. I thank them for their efforts and hope they find the experience as rewarding as I did.

I look forward to seeing these early career researchers develop their editorial skills, and to welcoming more assistant topical editors in future.

Shuo Sun

Shuo Sun is an assistant professor of Physics and an associate fellow of JILA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Maryland, College Park, while working on building the first solid-state spin-photon quantum switches and single-photon transistors. In 2017, he joined Stanford University as a postdoctoral research scholar, where he worked on color center based quantum optics. He obtained his B.S. in 2011 from Zhejiang University, China.

Nahid Talebi

Nahid Talebi graduated from Tehran University, Iran, with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2011, defended with distinction. During her studies, she visited the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, for 7 months with a scholarship from the Max Planck Society. In 2012, she joined the Stuttgart Center for Electron Microscopy as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow. In 2015, she became a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, and in 2018, she received an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council. In 2019, she joined the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, as an associate professor and a director of the Institute for Experimental and Applied Physics, holding the chair for Nanooptics. Her work explores the interaction of electron beams with light and nanostructures both to investigate fundamental quantum mechanical aspects of electron-light interaction, and to propose and realize novel characterization techniques with electron beams.