ChemNanoMat Appoints New Editor-in-Chief

The Asian Chemical Editorial Society (ACES) and Wiley-VCH have named Dr. Claire M. Cobley as Editor-in-Chief of ChemNanoMat, successor to Dr. Theresa Kueckmann, as of January 1, 2020. The appointment was confirmed by society representatives at the annual meeting of ACES and Wiley-VCH in Taipei in December.

Claire Cobley studied chemistry at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, and completed her undergraduate degree in 2006. She then moved to the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where she received a master’s degree in chemistry before moving with her advisor Younan Xia to Washington University in St. Louis, USA, to complete her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. Her research topics included the synthesis, optical properties, and biomedical applications of noble metal nanostructures. After graduate school, she went on to do postdoctoral work at the interface of nanochemistry and neuroscience with Joachim Spatz at the University of Heidelberg and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, both Germany.

Claire Cobley joined Wiley, Weinheim; Germany, in 2013, and worked at Chemistry—A European Journal until September 2014, when she joined the Chemistry-An Asian Journal and ChemNanoMat team. She took on the role of Managing Editor of ChemNanoMat in 2016.

ChemViews Magazine talked to Claire about her promotion.

What fascinates you about the topic and the idea of the journal?

Nanoscience is a very diverse field of study—work in this area constantly crosses the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Over the course of my research career, I worked with physicists and biologists just as often as I did with fellow chemists. Nevertheless, I believe that chemistry plays a central role in pushing the field forward.

Although several journals existed prior to ChemNanoMat that covered the field of nanoscience as a whole, there were none that highlighted the important contributions that chemists make in this area. So I was excited that we could create a journal to do just that.

Do you have a message for your predecessor?

Theresa Kueckmann has been a wonderful mentor to me since we started working together closely in 2014. I can’t thank her enough for all the guidance and support she has given me in navigating the challenging task of establishing a new journal in a fast-moving and competitive field.

What are you looking forward to?

I’m looking forward to celebrating the 5th anniversary of the journal this May! Time has truly flown.

We are putting together a special collection of papers from board members in honor of the occasion—the first paper went online shortly before this interview, and more articles will come soon.