Happy New Year, congratulations, thank you and welcome

Abdulla A.-B Badawy

Happy New Year to all our readers, contributors, expert Independent Referees and Editorial Advisors, members of the Editorial Team, and to members, officers and staff of the Medical Council on Alcoholism (MCA), the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ESBRA) and our publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP).

The first year of the New Millennium has brought with it major changes in the Editorial Team of Alcohol and Alcoholism and in the administration of the MCA, and I have great pleasure in marking these changes in the following statements.

Our readers will be delighted to learn of the elevation of the distinguished MCA President, Sir Leslie Turnberg, to the House of Lords and I am sure they would wish to join me in warmly congratulating The Lord Turnberg of Cheadle.

Professor Keith F. Tipton has just retired as the ESBRA Chief Editor after 5 years, during which we worked together in complete harmony in our parallel capacities. In addition to his considerable editorial activities, Professor Tipton has done much to strengthen the partnership between the MCA and ESBRA, and has performed his editorial and administrative activities with equal conviction and in spirited style and always in good humour. In describing the state of the MCA–ESBRA partnership as excellent, I am also delighted to acknowledge the splendid work of the officers of both organizations, namely the ESBRA President and Secretary Professors Christer Alling and Otto Lesch, respectively, and the outgoing MCA Executive Director Dr Peter Abraham, who retired in the year 2000. I am sure that all of you would want to join me in thanking both Professor Tipton and Dr Abraham most warmly and wishing them a happy and healthy retirement. The new MCA Executive Director is Dr Guy Ratcliffe, who has already made an important contribution to the MCA–ESBRA partnership. I also extend a warm welcome to Dr Ratcliffe.

I am also delighted to welcome Professor Gian Luigi Gessa as the new ESBRA Chief Editor. Professor Gessa is a most distinguished clinical scientist, who has made outstanding contributions to our knowledge of neurochemistry and pharmacology. He has published over 800 papers in renowned international journals and over 40 scientific volumes. He has received the Krakow and the Golgi Awards, and only last year in Yokohama, Japan, was awarded the James B. Isaacson Memorial Award of the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ISBRA) for his outstanding contributions to biomedical research on alcoholism. Professor Gessa has been a visiting fellow at Bernard B. Brodie's Laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland, and more recently at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, USA. Professor Gessa has been, or is, President or Director and/or a member of many academic, learned society and official committee boards in Italy, and a member of many European and other international learned societies. He is currently Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy, where he initially graduated in Medicine. His editorial experience is also a vast one, being a member of the Editorial Boards of many European and International journals in a number of biomedical disciplines. The choice by ESBRA of Professor Gessa is therefore clearly an excellent one, which will have a major impact on the standing of Alcohol and Alcoholism in years to come. I extend a warm welcome to Professor Gessa and express the certain sentiment of working together in full harmony for the benefit of this journal and its contributing and ordinary readership. I am also pleased to announce that the journal now has two editorial addresses. Authors now have the choice of sending their submissions to either the Cardiff or the Cagliari Editorial Office, the addresses of which are to be found in the Instructions to Authors.

Other changes in the Editorial Team have also taken place. Dr Nick Heather, our Associate Editor in Psychology, has resigned from his position to concentrate more on his ongoing research. I should like to pay tribute to his editorial work over the past several years and to wish him well in his Medical Research Council- and other funded-research. He is succeeded by another distinguished psychologist, Dr Steven Rollnick, Senior Lecturer at the Department of General Practice of the University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, UK. Dr Rollnick has made outstanding contributions in his field of expertise in the psychology and treatment of alcoholism, notably in motivational aspects of treatment and brief intervention strategies. Another addition to the Editorial Team is Dr Giancarlo Colombo, from Professor Gessa's Department in Cagliari, who becomes Associate Editor in the field of Behavioural Psychopharmacology. Dr Colombo received the ESBRA–NORDMANN Award in 1996 for his work on the alcohol-consummatory behaviour and related neurochemical processes in the Sardinian alcohol-preferring rat line. He therefore also fills an important gap in our team disciplines. A third appointment is that of Professor Mats Berglund, from the Department of Alcohol Diseases at Malmö University Hospital, Sweden, as Associate Editor in Psychiatry. Professor Berglund is a distinguished psychiatrist a with wide-ranging experience in many of aspects of his field and his appointment both underlines, and is in response to, the continually increasing contributions received by Alcohol and Alcoholism in psychiatric aspects of alcoholism. The appointments of Dr Rollnick, Dr Colombo and Professor Berglund to membership of the Editorial Team, in my opinion, will also have a major impact in the years to come and I look forward to working with them. Because of all the above changes, it has become clear that a re-alignment in the structure of the Editorial Team will be necessary to ensure the widest coverage of disciplines over the coming months. Further changes will therefore be made.

We thus begin 2001 with an impressive new Editorial Team at the disposal of our contributors, and I am therefore confident of the continued success of Alcohol and Alcoholism.





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