Honors

2023 BioResources Person of the Year

Dr. Hak Lae Lee, College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

BioResources is pleased to announce that our winner for the “Person of the Year” award for 2023 is Dr. Hak Lae Lee. Hak Lae recently retired from his position as Professor in the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences at Seoul National University, South Korea, but continues to work in his field as most professors do once they retire. In 2021, Dr. Lee took the bold step of volunteering himself for the Associate Editor position of BioResources. He stepped up from being an Editorial Board member and offered more of his time to devote towards additional journal activities, including helping with the overall peer review process, networking, commissioning high quality articles, and increasing personal submissions. Since he has joined BioResources as our Associate Editor, the journal has noticed a great increase in the number of submissions from the Korea region. Dr. Lee has continued to commission in excess of his quota each year for the journal. We were delighted when Dr. Lee visited North Carolina State University last year and met with the BioResources staff. We at BioResources wish to honor Dr. Hak Lae Lee for his high achievements as Associate Editor.

2022 BioResources Person of the Year

Kay Sun, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

BioResources is pleased to announce that our winner for the “Person of the Year” award for 2022 is Kay Sun.  Kay, who works in the computer support group for the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University, provided outstanding service, way beyond the call of duty, in upgrading the “Open Journal Systems” software employed by the journal BioResources for managing the processes of article submission, peer reviewing, and making published articles available to databases.  To begin, she researched the possibilities for automatic migration from an old version of OJS to a current version.  However, due to various problems with software versions, those efforts were unsuccessful.  That turned out to have been a blessing in disguise, since Kay was then able to focus on preparing a new account based on the most recent version of the software (OJS 3.3.0.13), with all of the latest upgrades in security, permitted file size, and other features.  Since the switchover in November, we have achieved much improved efficiency of our operations.  In particular, there has been a relatively high rate of responses to our automatically sent emails to prospective reviewers.  The average time needed to complete a cycle of reviewing has decreased.  Throughout the transition, Kay kept us all in the loop and preempted problems with such things as the renumbering of the new articles to match the previous series.  We at BioResources are very pleased with the new OJS software and wish to honor Kay Sun, who made this all possible.