In January 2020, the Editor-in-Chief position passed from Ioannis Chasiotis to Alan Zehnder. I would like to thank Ioannis for his outstanding leadership of the journal. Under his watch, Ioannis took Experimental Mechanics to a new level with innovations such as cover art, structured abstracts, and multiple special issues all while upholding high standards for the journal. I’d like to thank Jonathan Reichner who ended his team as Technical Editor in December 2020 and to thank Hongbing Lu, Huimin Xie, and Weinong Chen for renewing as Technical Editors for another three years. We welcome Paul Reynolds as a new technical editor in 2021.
In 2020, EM published 105 original papers in nine Issues, covering a wide range of topics. Papers explored the behavior of materials ranging from soft hydrogels to high strength steels under loading rates from creep testing to blast loading. Other topics include residual stress, optical methods, microscale experiments, damage mechanics and biomedical applications. The journal impact factor for 2019 was 2.50 (up from 2.26 the prior year), thanks to the efforts of our Editorial Board and the quality of papers submitted by all authors. All papers are available on online at http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/11340.
Three special issues are on track to be published in 2021. These include the Special Issue on Experimental Advances in Cardiovascular Biomechanics, by Guest Editors Susan Lessner and Jonathan Wenk, published in January with 21 papers. The two other special issues for this year include: Optics and Photomechanics, edited by Hiumin Xie, Xinglong Gong and Wei Qui and Tribology, edited by Frank DelRio, Alison Dunn, Brandon Krick, and Kenneth Liechti.
Plans for 2021 include recruiting additional Technical Editors to provide more international and topical coverage, to develop proposals for new Special Issues and review articles and to promote the submission of a greater number of high-quality papers to the journal. Please contact me or any of the Technical Editors with your proposals for Special Issues on new and growing research topics in experimental mechanics and mechanics of materials, or for ideas for review articles. I would also like to invite all members of the SEM to submit your best and most exciting research to EM and please spread the word to your colleagues and students about EM! I look forward to working with you all in 2021.