How peer reviewing can help you professionally: an upcoming Midweek Mixer

Monday, November 2 at noon CST (UTC–06/Chicago, USA), moderator Yunbing Tan and panelists Doug Hayes, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents, and Jim Kenar, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Oil Chemists' Society will host the Midweek Mixer, "How peer reviewing can help you professionally". You can read more about the Mixer and the hosts below. 

Why join?

The peer-review process is an important step for improving research paper quality; however, less is known about the standardized review process. This Mixer will provide a platform for attendees to share their reviewing experiences and ask questions about how to get involved, best review practices and more. Other topics that we hope to discuss include how to balance research and reviewing and what could we learn or get from this reviewing experience. This Mixer is designed to be both an informative session on how peer reviewing can enhance your professional development and an opportunity for you to network with peers also interested in journal reviewing.

Join AOCS for a Midweek Mixer hosted by the AOCS Student Common Interest Group (SCIG): https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2QAT2slOQ_2iaYTOBhWZ1g

Get to know your hosts:

Mixer moderator

Yunbing Tan is currently a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Food Biopolymers and Colloids laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has a strong academic background in food science with competitive GPAs in both Bachelor's (3.82/4.00) and Master's (3.67/4.00) degrees. Previously, she has done research in several distinctive areas, including evaluation and characterization of emulsion systems and their in-vitro digestion fate, protein hydrolysis and its application in dairy products functional foods. To date, she has published 14 scientific articles in well-respected journals with three of them as the first author. Her work has been with many scholarships and awards during her undergraduate and graduate studies. In the future, she would like to continue research on the application of the INFOGEST method to understand the gastrointestinal fate of various emulsions systems in regard to their lipid digestion properties as well as bioavailability of encapsulated components. Yunbing Tan is the winner of AOCS' Lipid Processing and Biotechnology Division Awards in 2020.

Mixer panelists

Doug Hayes is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents. He is a Professor of Biosystems Engineering at the University of Tennessee (UT) and also serves as an Adjunct Professor for Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UT, a Guest Professor at Wuhan Polytechnic University and Jinan University (Guangzhou, China), and a UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Joint Faculty member. He received a B.S. and Ph.D. at Iowa State University (1986) and University of Michigan (1991), respectively, both in chemical engineering. He served as a Postdoctoral Research Chemist at the USDA/ARS/NCAUR from 1991 to 1994, and as an Assistant and Associate Professor at UAH (Chemical and Materials Engineering, 1991–1994) before joining UT. He received the Impact Award (2017) and the John J. and Dorothy G. McDow Faculty Excellence Award (2019) from the UT Institute of Agriculture. Doug has over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals, over 20 book chapters and three co-edited books. His research interests include surfactant self-assembly systems, biobased products, bioplastics and applied enzymology.

A longstanding member of AOCS, Hayes became a reviewer for the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (JAOCS) when he was a postdoc at the US Department of Agriculture. He became an Associate Editor (AE) for JAOCS in 1999, an AE for JSD in 2010, and a Senior Associate Editor for JAOCS in 2013. He is also the author of the INFORM magazine article, “How peer reviewing has helped my career” in the April 2019 issue of the magazine. 

Jim Kenar is a research chemist at the US Department of Agriculture–National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (USDA–NCAUR) in Peoria, Illinois, USA. Jim is an active member of AOCS and currently a senior associate editor for the Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society (JAOCS). He has been the journal’s editor-in-chief since May 2016. Jim’s research interests focus on the modification and utilization of agricultural materials (vegetable oils and polysaccharides) for food and nonfood applications. Jim Kenar joined AOCS in 2000.