I am very pleased to introduce Johannes Courtial as our new Feature Editor at JOSA A. In this newly created position, he will lead efforts to generate new JOSA A feature issues and tutorials [1]. That’s a whole lot of newness and represents a step forward for the Journal. Johannes served for six years as JOSA A topical editor [2,3]. He established a record of achievement that the rest of the world will never really know, but that was visible to me and the staff of OSA Publications [4]. He shepherded remarkable papers, helped authors improve their articles and reach a wider audience, and made hard decisions on challenging manuscripts. As you might see in his own writing, Johannes brings a certain good humor, a rare mix of confidence and humility, and an affection for our discipline and those who practice it that will make him successful in this new role.

This editorial is actually a little overdue; Johannes is a few months into his new position and already we see a glimpse of the improvements he will bring to JOSA A. We have several tutorials in the chute and some feature issues that, well, you’ll just have to tune in to see. Great times lie ahead for JOSA A.

I am also very pleased to welcome new Topical Editor Felipe Guzman. Felipe works at the point where cutting-edge optical technology meets the deep mysteries of the universe. It’s exciting stuff and we have much to look forward to with Filipe on the team. His own career demonstrates the broad reach of optics and the potential for discovery still awaiting us.

Feature Editor

Johannes Courtial

A Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, UK, since 2016, Johannes was elected OSA Fellow in 2017 (Fellows class of 2018) [5] for his many contributions to optics. He continues to make those contributions, and to date he has published nine excellent research papers in JOSA A, including two just this year [6,7]. He studied at the University of Wüürzburg, Germany, and went on to receive his M. Phil. and Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, UK, in 1995 and 1999, respectively. He joined the University of Glasgow as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 2001 and became Lecturer in 2009. His research interests include optical angular momentum, fractal laser modes, holography, and generalized refraction with pixelated optical elements, especially its application to imaging and ray-optical transformation optics. He has authored over 90 journal publications and several book chapters, and is a member of The Optical Society and the UK’s Institute of Physics.

Felipe Guzman

Optical Systems and Precision Measurements

Felipe Guzman is an experimental physicist specializing in space optical technologies, inertial sensing, novel optomechanical sensors, and precision laser interferometry. He is the PI of the University of Arizona (UA) groups in the international LISA Mission Consortium, and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Costa Rica, subsequently moving to Germany to obtain a Master’s degree in Engineering Physics at the University of Oldenburg. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, where his doctoral research focused on the development of optical technologies for LISA, LISA Pathfinder, and GRACE follow-on. He was awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and later performed as Senior Research Associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, and led a research group at the German Space Agency (DLR) in collaboration with the University of Bremen. He joined the faculty of the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona as an Associate Professor in fall 2018.