Journal of Clinical Investigation: A Conversation with Francis Collins by Ushma Neil

Ushma Neil of the Journal of Clinical Investigation continues her Conversations with Giants in Medicine with Francis Collins, a scientist who needs little introduction to the biomedical community. After getting his PhD in Physical Chemistry at Yale, and his medical degree at the University of North Carolina, Collins zeroed in on genetics as his area of concentration, and is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and later his leadership of the International Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human genome. Since August 2009, Collins has served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world.

The Journal of Clinical Investigation is a top-tier venue for critical advances in biomedical research. The JCI has a 2011 Impact Factor of 13.069 and a 5-year Impact Factor of 15.430, placing it second in the category of Medicine, Research and Experimental. This along with free access to all of its research articles makes the JCI a prestigious, high-impact venue for authors seeking the broadest audience for their most important work.

The journal is headed by Editor in Chief Dr. Howard Rockman and an Editorial Board of peer scientists at Duke University Medical Center, the University of North Carolina, Duke-NUS, and Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute whose depth and experience ensure fair and competent peer review.

Ushma S. Neill obtained her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University studying pulmonary mechanics and used her Marshall Sherfield Postdoctoral Fellowship at Imperial College, London, to study vascular permeability. After 2 years as an editor at Nature Medicine, she joined the JCI in March 2003 as Executive Editor. In May 2012, Ushma became Director of the Office of the President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.