ChemPlusChem Appoints New Editor-in-Chief

ChemPubSoc Europe and Wiley-VCH have named Dr. Jonathan Faiz as Editor-in-Chief of ChemPlusChem, successor to Dr. Marisa Spiniello, as of October 1, 2019. The appointment was confirmed by society representatives at the annual meeting of ChemPubSoc Europe and Wiley-VCH in Warsaw in September.

Jonathan Faiz studied at the University of Oxford, UK, where he carried out his master’s project with Harry L. Anderson. He worked with Zoe Pikramenou at the University of Birmingham, UK, for his Ph.D., which was in the area of supramolecular and photophysical chemistry, with an emphasis on light-induced electron and energy transfer in self-assembled systems. After postdoctoral work in Birmingham, and a research fellowship with Jean-Pierre Sauvage at the Université de Strasbourg, France, he joined Wiley-VCH in 2008.

He spent more than ten years on the editorial team of Angewandte Chemie, where he was responsible for peer review in (bio)analytical chemistry and the organization of the magazine section (Editorials, News, Author Profiles, Essays, Viewpoints), and he joined ChemPlusChem in 2019.

ChemPlusChem is a multidisciplinary journal with a focus on chemistry that was launched in 2012, succeeding the Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications. It recently received its highest-ever impact factor of 3.44.

What fascinates you about the idea of the journal?

I have always loved multidisciplinary research. When I was an undergraduate, chemistry teaching was strictly divided into the three classical divisions of inorganic, organic, and physical. This also applied to research to some extent – the three departments were even in separate buildings!

When I chose research projects, I never wanted to do “just” one type of chemistry, but was interested in both synthesis, spectroscopy and applications, and carried out my Ph.D. in a multidisciplinary research group where collaboration was essential. The multidisciplinary focus of ChemPlusChem makes it stand out from other general chemistry journals and allows me to see some great science that is not restricted to one subfield of chemistry.

What do you like about your job?

I really enjoy the networking. It is amazing who you meet again, sometimes years later. When I was a Ph.D. student in Zoe Pikramenou’s group, we had a collaboration with Luisa De Cola. One day when I was in Jean-Pierre Sauvage’s group, Paolo Samorí came by for a meeting. Both Luisa and Paolo are board members of ChemPlusChem – who would have thought that years later we would interact again in this context.

It really is a small world and I am always happy to meet former collaborators and make new contacts.

Do you have a message for your predecessor?

I can not praise my predecessor Marisa Spiniello highly enough. It is a tough job establish any new journal, and even more so for a general chemistry journal. Marisa’s dedication and uncompromising stance on quality meant that ChemPlusChem was in excellent shape when I took it over. It is thanks to her efforts, as well as the support from our board members, societies, and colleagues at Wiley-VCH, that the journal has grown so much since its launch in 2012.