At the November 3, 2018, meeting of Council, Samuel (Sam) Safran was selected to serve as the first editor-in-chief of The Biophysicist, a new journal of the Biophysical Society that will focus on education issues, teaching approaches, and empirical research. Safran is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Physics at the Weizmann Institute, Israel.
Safran, a member of the Biophysical Society since 2001, received his PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His professional interests include theoretical physics of soft and biological matter; cooperative structure and dynamics with an emphasis on cell shapes, biological cell adhesion, cellular and nuclear mechanics and dynamics, self-assembly of amphiphiles (membranes, vesicles), and electrostatic interactions in soft and biological matter. He has a strong interest in interdisciplinary science education with an emphasis on the role of physics in the understanding of biology and materials science. Safran has served on the editorial boards of Soft Matter, Langmuir, and Current Opinion in Colloid Science, and has published numerous articles, books, and invited reviews.
The Biophysicist is an online-only journal being developed by the Biophysical Society to publish high-quality, original peer-reviewed articles and invited reviews that are within the broad purview of teaching and learning biophysics at any educational and professional level. Features of the journal will include articles on generalized education, educational research, current topics in teaching, biophysics history and perspectives to the field, tutorial articles on specific topics in biophysics, software notes, technical developments, as well as laboratory methods. In additional to education topics, the journal will address the teaching of biophysics through written and video documentation.
Safran presented a strong vision for the journal, including a target author and reader community that includes biophysicists as well as those who may identify as physicists, chemists, engineers, or biologists. “The needs of the biophysics community are unique since it includes students, educators, and researchers who often come to the field from different disciplinary backgrounds; what unifies them is the application of their expertise, conceptualization, and methods to problems in the life sciences. The traditions of physics, chemistry, and engineering encourage the development and application of novel experimental approaches as well as the imaginative design of synthetic biophysical systems,” says Safran.
Watch for news of the journal launch in 2019!