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New Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Breath Research announced as Dr. Joachim Pleil

11 Jun 2015 by iopp

Dr. Joachim Pleil has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Breath Research.

Dr. Pleil is a Research Physical Scientist with the Office of Research and Development of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (ORD/EPA).  He currently works in the Human Exposure and Atmospheric Sciences Division of the National Exposure Research Laboratory located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.  He also serves as adjunct Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the Gillings School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill.

He earned undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics, as well an MS degree in Physics from the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, and a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering from UNC.  He worked for about 7 years as a Research Physicist with Northrop Corporation (laser optics and spectroscopy), and joined the EPA in 1987 where he has served to the present in a variety of laboratory based projects including photo-acoustic spectroscopy, gas chromatography – mass spectrometry, and immunochemistry.

As a Federal researcher, he has had the opportunity to collaborate on environmental health issues with all branches of the U.S. Military, NASA, CDC, NIOSH, and the U.S. intelligence community.   He has authored or co-authored over 120 articles, reviews, editorials, book chapters, and published Government reports of which 40 are related to exhaled breath analysis (and 19 are published in Journal of Breath Research).  He is a founding member and scientific board member of the International Association of Breath Research (IABR) and of the Journal of Breath Research.

His current research explores the human exposome and the linkage between environment and health as expressed by adverse outcome pathways at the cellular and molecular level.  He continues to collaborate with observational in vivo human studies, and is now incorporating exhaled breath and breath aerosols as the biological medium.  He has recently become interested in cellular-level respiration and is developing methodology for “cell-breath” exploration for chemical toxicity testing as possible alternative to in vivo animal studies.

Dr. Pleil is following in the footsteps of his good friend and colleague, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Breath Research, Prof. Anton Amann, who passed away recently.  He hopes to continue the positive trend established under Anton’s guidance in the success of the journal in publishing innovative breath research articles and plans to further expand the scope of the journal to breath related sciences including topics in physiology, inhalation toxicology, optical and chemical sensors, instrument engineering, and data interpretation.

He has described the journal as being: “…extraordinarily well positioned in an important field of research that cuts across clinical medicine, disease diagnostics, public health, and instrument design.  What I really like is great sense of collegiality in the breath research community and how the oft-disparate topics of breath research come together in the journal to generate novel insights in health and instrumentation.  The journal is, in my opinion, unique in this respect; physicists, engineers, chemists, biologists, and medical researchers can all find common ground through breath-related technologies in solving today’s most pressing health issues.”

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