We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Alejandro M. Mayer has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Marine Drugs from January 2014.

Alejandro M.S. Mayer, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Pharmacology at the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, Midwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and from 1985 to 1988, he completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in marine immunopharmacology in the laboratory of Dr. Robert S. Jacobs at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 1990 to 1993, he joined the faculty of the Physiology Department, Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. Since 1993, he has been a faculty member at the Department of Pharmacology, Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, Midwestern University, where he rose from Assistant to Full Professor of Pharmacology in 2000. Dr. Mayer teaches pharmacology to medical, pharmacy, dental and health sciences students and continues to be actively involved in research in both marine immunopharmacology and immunotoxicology. He is the author of 71 peer-reviewed research papers, which include a series of 14 marine pharmacology reviews covering the period 1998‑2011 which he has co-authored with Drs. Gustafson, Hamann, Berlinck, Rodríguez, Taglialatela-Scafati and Fusetani, and which have systematically reviewed global marine pharmacological and pharmaceutical research. In 2010 he reviewed the global pharmaceutical pipeline with Dr. Glaser, Cuevas, Jacobs, Kem, Little, McIntosh, Newman, Potts and Shuster. Dr. Mayer has been awarded 2 patents and has been funded by the Department of Commerce, NOAA, Sea Grant College Program and NIH, and is a member of AAAS, ASPET, and Society for Toxicology. Since 2005, Professor Mayer has been curator of a marine pharmaceuticals website which he established with the generous help of many researchers from academia, industry and government who are currently involved in the global marine pharmaceuticals pipeline, which involves both preclinical and clinical research on the pharmacology of marine-derived chemicals (http://marinepharmacology.midwestern.edu/).

Professor Mayer will succeed Prof. Dr. Hartmut Laatsch, who has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Marine Drugs from September 2009 to December 2013. During the tenure of Professor Laatsch, the journal has had great success, seeing a sustained increase in both the number of publications and the journal impact. Marine Drugs now ranked 6 out of 59 in the category ‘Chemistry, Medicinal’ according to the 2012 Journal Citation Reports^® published by Thomson Reuters. We would like to express our great appreciation for the hard work and support of Professor Laatsch.

Since 2007, Professor Mayer has served as Associate Editor of Marine Drugs and edited a very successful special issue “Marine Toxins”, which published 25 papers of excellent quality. He also participated in journal development and has regularly made acceptance decisions on multiple papers. We wish to acknowledge the valuable contribution Professor Mayer has already made to the journal.

We would like to warmly welcome Professor Mayer as Editor-in-Chief and look forward to his contributing to the continued success of Marine Drugs.