Welcoming Emily Baird and Philipp Lehmann to the JEB editorial team

Emily Baird (left, photo credit: Simon Hastegård) and Philipp Lehmann (right, photo credit: Patrick Geßner)Journal of Experimental Biology has sometimes been likened to a family. With a strong sense of community, the journal welcomes scientists who care about understanding the creatures that they work with. At the heart of the journal is the team of committed Monitoring Editors that oversees peer review of the research submitted to the journal. With backgrounds from comparative physiology, biomechanics and neuroethology, the Editors are well qualified to nurture manuscripts as they proceed to publication, resulting in the robust research that is the hallmark of the journal. We are welcoming two new members to the group of Monitoring Editors: neuroethologist Emily Baird, from Stockholm University, Sweden; and insect physiologist Philipp Lehmann from University of Greifswald, Germany, to strengthen and enhance the expertise that is central to the journal's success.‘I felt extremely honoured when I was invited to join JEB's editorial team, not only because it gives me the opportunity to help uphold the integrity of the journal…but also to be able to give back to the academic community and research leaders of the future’, says Baird, whose career began in her home country of Australia. Growing up on a farm 30 km from Canberra, Baird was surrounded by domesticated and wild animals from an early age, developing a passion for natural history. Arriving at the Australian National University as a combined Arts and Science undergraduate, covering philosophy and biology, Baird went on to major in neuroscience to pursue her interest in the brain. During this time, she was inspired by a course on the neural basis of behaviour, taught by Cobie Brinkman, and when she came to select her Honours research project, there was only one option for her: the opportunity to investigate how honeybees use vision to control their flight with Mandyam Srinivasan and Shaowu Zhang. ‘I had not previously considered working with insects’, she admits, but the decision sealed Baird's fate. Her undergraduate degree extended into a PhD in Srinivasan and Zhang's lab resulting in a publication in JEB (Baird et al., 2005), which has gone on to inspire autonomous robot control systems (Roubieu et al., 2014).In 2008, Baird made the bold decision to leave Australia and head to Lund, Sweden, where she joined Eric Warrant and Marie Dacke. There she continued studying bee flight, but she also branched out to learn about dung beetle navigation in South Africa and nocturnal beetle flight control in Panama. ‘The most elaborate experiment that I have been involved in was related to studying whether dung beetles could use the Milky Way to orient’, says Baird, describing how she and her colleagues, Dacke, Warrant and Marcus Byrne, set up a lab in the planetarium at University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, displaying different constellations to the beetles to find out how they could navigate a perfectly straight line using the night sky. ‘We found that the beetles could orient under the projected Milky Way’, says Baird (Dacke et al., 2013), recalling that this remarkable discovery also earned the researchers a coveted Ig Nobel Prize in 2013. After setting up her first lab at the University of Lund, Baird moved to Stockholm University, Sweden, in 2018 as a Senior Lecturer, switching focus to learn more about the impact of the environment on insect sensory systems. Reflecting on her 20 year association with the journal, Baird has always found JEB to be fair, adding that the research published in the journal has been a cornerstone for her own studies. And as she embarks on her new role, she says that she is looking forward to upholding the journal's integrity and reputation, ‘values that I have appreciated as an author and a reviewer’, she says.Also joining the JEB fold in 2025, Philipp Lehmann is looking forward to learning more about the fantastic work currently going on in the community and having the opportunity to contribute to developing manuscripts to their full potential. ‘The first paper I ever scientifically reviewed for a journal club was from JEB’, Lehmann says, recalling that the paper by Richard Taylor and colleagues (Taylor et al., 1996) was initially daunting, but he appreciated how the principles of symmorphosis were clearly laid out to him, even as a new graduate student. Lehmann credits his mother for inspiring his love for biology as he accompanied her bird watching and foraging for mushrooms and wild berries during his childhood in Finland. But his passion for physiology was inspired by Mikael Segerstråle while an undergraduate at the University of Helsinki, Finland. ‘I found it so satisfying to understand how different complex systems function’, he says. A PhD at University of Jyväskylä, Finland, followed, during which Lehmann studied the devastating progress of the Colorado potato beetle across Europe. Lehmann describes the subtropical insect's ability to go into a form of suspended animation, known as diapause, during the harsh northern winter, which has allowed the insects to reach the subarctic in less than a century. Switching during his postdoc at the University of Stockholm, Sweden, to work on butterflies, Lehmann focused on the mechanisms that allow the insects to survive different seasonal conditions. But it was a 6 month visit to John Terblanche at Stellenbosch University in 2018 that Lehmann describes as formative in his ideas about the interplay between insect ecophysiology and climate change.Now based at the University of Greifswald, Germany, Lehmann's laboratory investigates how insects maintain their energy budget in the face of environmental pressures – from seasonal temperature changes to the inability to feed – to understand better the challenges that climate change will bring. ‘I love drawing up experiments and theories on the whiteboard with colleagues and seeing students and postdocs coming up with great ideas, testing them and “owning” the results’, he says. But Lehmann admits that his most precious moments are when he manages to find time to set up an experiment to measure the metabolism of one of his favourite insects, the green-veined white butterfly (Pieris napi), in the lab. ‘I often wonder how anyone can be something else than a biologist’, he laughs. Reacting to JEB Editor-in-Chief, Craig Franklin's, invitation to become a Monitoring Editor, Lehmann admits that initially he was shocked, but soon excited by the fabulous possibilities offered by the opportunity. ‘JEB is a journal that manages to stay modern and classic at the same time’, Lehmann says, adding that for him the journal is a stable haven for high-quality comparative physiology in an increasingly complex publishing environment.From September 2025, Baird will be overseeing peer review of manuscripts in various fields including neuroethology, sensory physiology, behaviour and neurobiology, while Lehmann will be handling manuscripts in areas ranging from ecophysiology and evolutionary physiology to bioenergetics and invertebrate physiology. Greeting Baird and Lehmann, Franklin says, ‘I'm delighted to welcome our two new editors, whose fresh perspectives and expertise will undoubtedly strengthen our commitment to our research community and enhance the quality of research we bring to our readers’.