Michael White is Nature’s editor for climate science, handling submissions on atmospheres, oceans, the cryosphere and hydrology – past, present, and future, on Earth and other planets. Michael works closely with Nature’s editors for biogeoscience, economics, and ecology and is broadly experienced in interdisciplinary Earth System Science. Before coming to Nature in 2008, Michael was an academic at Utah State University, where he conducted research on land surface phenology and terrestrial biogeochemistry — mostly using computational models and satellite remote sensing.

Rita Strack is a senior editor at Nature Methods and has been with the journal since November of 2014. She primarily handles manuscripts related to imaging, microscopy, and probes, but also has interests in biochemistry, structural biology, and molecular biology. Before becoming an editor, Rita did her graduate work in biochemistry with Ben Glick and Bob Keenan at the University of Chicago, where she studied and engineered red fluorescent proteins. Following her graduate work, she did her postdoc in Samie Jaffrey’s lab at Weill Cornell in Manhattan, where she developed ‘Spinach’ aptamers for imaging RNA in live cells and studied toxic RNAs associated with FXTAS. Beyond handling manuscripts, Rita’s professional interests include improving scientific reproducibility, promoting diversity in science, and helping junior researchers explore careers outside of academia.

After getting his bachelor degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dr. Fessenden was admitted to the Cancer Biology PhD program at the University of Chicago. Here, he worked with Dr. Margaret Gardel investigating signaling and mechanics that guide multicellular invasion. After graduating, Dr. Fessenden turned to tumor-immune interactions and immune cell migration as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. In the fall of 2021, he left Boston and bench research to join the Journal of Cell Biology in Manhattan. As a Scientific Editor, Dr. Fessenden handles manuscripts from all fields of biology that concern the fundamental operations of cells and cell communities.