It has been a little over a year since I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief at Spinal Cord. I entered the position with a vision for where I wanted the journal to go and have been working hard to bring this to fruition. It is a privilege to have this role and to be able to work with such a talented team of Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, and staff at Springer Nature. Additionally, the International Spinal Cord Society, which oversees the journal, has an incredible passion for advancing spinal cord injury care and research, and it is an honour to work with their leadership as we look for innovative ways to further the journal’s mission.

I am inspired by the research being submitted for consideration at Spinal Cord from talented scientists and clinicians around the globe. When I reflect on where the field was in the 1990s and 2000s, it is remarkable how far we have come. Of note, many of the landmark papers that have changed how we care for individuals living with spinal cord conditions, from rehabilitation to surgical care to emerging therapies, were published in Spinal Cord. This was highlighted by a recent bibliometric analysis, which identified Spinal Cord as the journal that has published the highest number of acute spinal cord injury studies over the past two decades [1]. Looking back on my first year as Editor-in-Chief with Spinal Cord, there are certainly a number of papers we have published that I am confident will be highly consequential for the field, leading to improved clinical care standards and quality of life.

My first order of business as Editor-in-Chief at Spinal Cord was to build upon the already established Editorial team and to bring in perspectives from different disciplines, geographical locations, and backgrounds. At the time of writing this editorial, we have nine Associate Editors and twenty-three Editorial Board Members (Table 1). These individuals are highly skilled leaders in their fields, and I am extremely fortunate that they have chosen to join me at Spinal Cord and to lend their time and knowledge to provide the best peer-review process to submitting authors.

Given the outstanding quality of science being submitted to Spinal Cord, it is critical that we do our best to promote the published work and to give the authors tools to share their findings as far as possible. To this end, we continue to leverage social media (X - @JournalSCI and LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/spinal-cord-006337164) to share published works with our ~4100 engaged followers. Further, in order to maximize engagement, it is important to have eye-catching text and graphics. Thus, we are actively working with authors to provide customized summaries of the research, author social media handles, and to generate visual abstracts that communicate key findings from studies to our followers.

We are undertaking new initiatives in 2025 to further showcase the work being published in Spinal Cord. Starting in June we will be releasing a monthly podcast that gives a voice to the researchers behind leading spinal cord research. We are very excited about this initiative, which will operate under the already established and highly successful “SCI Care - What Really Matters” ISCOS podcast series banner [2]. Our first episode will be released in June 2025 and will feature Dr. Ashley Craig, who spoke about his recent publication in Spinal Cord titled “The Sir Ludwig Guttmann lecture 2023: psychosocial factors and adjustment dynamics after spinal cord injury” [3].

It is truly an honor to be the Editor-in-Chief, and alongside my team of highly qualified and dedicated Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, and journal staff, we look forward to serving you and making Spinal Cord your journal of choice. I hope to interact with you all in the future.