I am extremely excited to be leading our journal, Pediatric Radiology, as the Managing Editor for the Americas. The enormous trust placed in me by the Society for Pediatric Radiology and Springer has both honored and humbled me.

It is an incredible responsibility to build upon the legacy of Walter Berdon, Tom Slovis, and Peter Strouse – three giants of pediatric radiology who served as managing editors for the Americas from 1985 to 2022. I will not deny that the job is a bit daunting. I am extremely grateful for the extensive onboarding provided by Peter Strouse, and I am fortunate to have an excellent editorial team with Andrew Trout as the Senior Assistant Editor, and Monica Epelman and Sjirk Westra as Assistant Editors.

Pediatric Radiology is our journal. I will be counting on each one of you—readers, authors, reviewers, editorial board members, and our publishing team as we continue our journey together.

To this end, I am sharing my vision and my to-do list with you. My vision is that Pediatric Radiology continues to be the premier source of rigorous scientific research and educational reviews in pediatric imaging. My goal for our journal is to promote the health of children across the globe and train the next generation of pediatric imagers in a diverse and inclusive environment.

I have three immediate priorities as the Managing Editor. These are ensuring a rigorous and efficient peer review process, innovating to engage and involve younger pediatric radiologists, and furthering our international engagement.

An excellent peer review process is essential to ensure that what we publish is critically evaluated. In this time of workforce shortages in pediatric radiology, finding reviewers has been challenging. To expand our pool of reviewers and to train the next generation of reviewers/authors, we will launch a mentored review program. The program will connect experienced reviewers with those interested in learning how to do an excellent peer review. In addition to participating in the peer review process, mentors/mentees will be invited to write commentaries on some manuscripts they review. So, whether you are an experienced reviewer or a novice, I urge you to start thinking about potential mentors/mentees you would want to partner with.

To support the needs of our modern learners, I will incorporate “bite-sized learning” and an expanded presence on social media for our journal. To this end, we will be introducing graphical abstracts to Pediatric Radiology. These graphical abstracts will accompany traditional abstracts in the table of contents to provide a concise visual summary of the article in a single power point slide. I believe that graphical abstracts are especially pertinent to radiologists as we are visual people who rely on image-based learning. We will also use the visual abstracts to highlight our authors’ work on social media.

I am grateful to Susan Hamman for promoting Pediatric Radiology on social media. To further this effort and to provide an opportunity to our trainees and early career radiologists to get more involved with the journal, a digital/social media panel will be added to the editorial board.

As someone who grew up and went to medical school in India, I understand the challenges of writing faced by those who use English as a second language. In collaboration with the World Federation of Pediatric Imaging, I will build upon the foundation established by Peter Strouse and Monica Epelman to help authors who do not speak English as their primary language. To acknowledge radiologists who help authors from develo** countries we will add an international outreach panel to the editorial board.

I am fortunate to have an excellent counterpart across the Atlantic Ocean – Prof. Amaka C. Offiah. Amaka and I will work together to increase the global presence of our journal and ensure that Pediatric Radiology is truly representative of the four international pediatric radiology societies it represents. We will be soliciting articles from international pediatric radiologists and increasing the geographic diversity of our editorial board.

Having served as an assistant editor for Pediatric Radiology for 7 years, I know that being an editor can sometimes feel like being a hamster on a wheel with the never-ending stream of manuscripts in various stages of publication. But I hope to pause and reflect every now and then and be very intentional about bringing innovation to our journal.

I have reached this stage of my career thanks to the mentorship of those who recognized my potential when I first came to the USA as a foreign medical graduate. It is my turn to give back to the profession and help the younger radiologists become better scientists, educators, and physicians. I promise to judge each manuscript kee** the adage in mind that the editor has no friends or foes. Each manuscript will be evaluated solely for its merit and its impact on pediatric imaging.

I look forward to partnering with you as we continue the trajectory of excellence for our journal Pediatric Radiology.