By Daniel Dunaief
Martha Furie has a job no other woman has held in the 122-year history of a highly regarded scientific periodical. A professor of pathology and molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University, Furie is the new editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Pathology, taking over the top editorial job at a journal where she has been a contributor since 1993.
“As a woman, it is certainly gratifying to see an accomplished and capable woman such as Martha being chosen to lead the way,” said Kari Nejak-Bowen, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, in an email. “Seeing women such as [Furie] in positions of power and visibility will empower other female scientists to dream that they can accomplish similar goals.”
Richard Mitchell, a senior associate editor at the journal and a professor of pathology and health sciences and technology and vice chair for education at Brigham and Women’s Hospital also applauded the choice. Furie “was probably the very best person we could recruit for the job and is someone who has the energy and vision for leading us into the challenging future,” Mitchell said.
From 1986 through 2014 Furie ran a lab that focused on the study of the body’s immune response to infections from Lyme disease and tularemia, which is cause by a bacterium that is classified as a potential agent of bioterrorism. In 2014, she became the director of the Graduate Program in Genetics at Stony Brook.
Kenneth Shroyer, the chair of the Department of Pathology at SBU, described the periodical Furie starts leading in 2018 as the “top pathology journal.”
As she takes the helm of the journal, Furie plans to navigate the periodical toward more translational research. “The Journal has been very focused on understanding the basic mechanisms of disease,” she said. “Research in all areas is getting much more translational: The bench-to-bedside thinking is where funding agencies are focusing their efforts,” and it’s also where the periodical she now leads is heading.
The tagline for the journal, which Nejak-Bowen said helped pioneer the current understanding of cell death, used to be Cellular and Molecular Biology of Disease. Furie changed that to Discoveries in Basic and Translational Pathobiology.
Shroyer believes the new direction should help the journal compete and redefine its niche for a wider range of readers. While Furie is excited about the opportunity, she acknowledges the increasingly challenging nature of the business. “Scientific publishing is a tough area right now,” she said. “There are fewer people in research because funding has diminished,” while, at the same time, more journals are competing to highlight research discoveries.
She will try to raise the journal’s profile for research scientists. Furie plans on expanding the journal’s social media presence and will do more marketing, while working with expert associate editors and getting them more involved in soliciting submissions. She also plans to make collections of highly cited papers in targeted areas and intends to use these to market the journal to attendees at specialized conferences.
Furie will spend this month contacting each of the associate editors and will solicit suggestions for people who might like to join the publication. She will also seek ideas for the journal. Mitchell suggested that Furie would likely benefit from these interactions. She is a “very good listener and is thoughtful in the questions she asks,” he said. “She is very discerning in assimilating the answers she gets back.” Shroyer expressed confidence in Furie’s leadership, citing a string of accolades and accomplishments in an SBU career that began in 1986.
Furie was the president of the American Society for Investigative Pathology from the middle of 2011 through the middle of 2012. She was also the recipient of the Robbins Distinguished Educator Award in 2017, which recognizes people whose contributions to education in pathology had an important impact at a regional, national or international level.
Furie and Nejak-Bowen co-organized and co-chaired the ASIP Scientific Sleuthing of Human Disease for High School Teachers and Students in April 2017. With this effort, Furie has already had some success in changing the direction and target audience of an ongoing program. The session, which provides high school teachers with concepts of human disease that they can incorporate into their classroom, now includes high school students.
“This has really revitalized the program, as the students are inquisitive and very engaged with the material,” Nejak-Bowen explained. Furie was “instrumental in encouraging this change in focus, and is passionate about building an improving this session every year.”
The opportunity Furie has as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pathology “continues her role as a national leader that she’s established,” Shroyer said.
Furie said she benefited from a diverse staff at Stony Brook, that included women like current Professor Emeritus Gail Habicht, when she first arrived. One of the best pieces of advice she received from Habicht was to understand that you can have a family and a successful career.
“You might not be able to do it to the same standard of perfection you did before you had children, but you can have a meaningful career and raise successful children and be happy doing both,” recalled Furie, who has two sons, Jon and Dan, and a 10-month-old grandson Tyler, who lives in Bedford, New York. She is married to Richard Furie, the chief of the Division of Rheumatology at Northwell Health, whom she met in a physics class at Cornell over 45 years ago.
Nejak-Bowen said Furie “leads by example when it comes to work/life balance.” Nejak-Bowen urges women scientists to find a mentor who can offer advice through all stages of a career. She has long considered Furie “a friend, mentor and inspiration.”
Based on Furie’s track record, Shroyer is confident in her continued success and anticipates that the journal will “thrive under her direction.”
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