At IEEE Journal of Microwaves we believe that quality reviewers deserve some extra recognition! As such we have just established an “Outstanding Reviewers” program wherein at the end of each year, both authors and editors are solicited to search through their past papers and nominate particular reviews that made a real difference to the quality of a particular manuscript or the ability of an editor to make a decision on the true merits of a submitted paper. After considerable effort, we also convinced both the MTT Society Awards Committee and the IEEE Technical Activities Board Awards and Recognition Committee chairs that we could/should recognize individuals who have gone above and beyond in evaluating manuscripts. Especially important to the JMW Editor-in-Chief are the recommendations of authors – many of whom had lots of extra work to do after receiving their reviewer comments – in suggesting reviews that really helped them improve their submissions. It might surprise you to hear that the authors who had to do the most work to satisfy their reviewers, were the ones who made the majority of the nominations.

During the nomination and evaluation process, reviewer identities are kept completely anonymous and only the Editor-in-Chief knows the identities of the nominees.

Out of some 400 reviewers who completed one or more paper evaluations during our first two years of publication, we have selected five outstanding individuals who have submitted extremely helpful reviews, based either on author or editor recommendations. We also recognize the reviewer who has done the most evaluations for us: Professor Jeffrey Nanzer of Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA.

The citations for outstanding individual reviews are: Professor Vicente E. Boria from iTEAM-DCOM, Universitat Politècnica de Valéncia, Spain; Professor Sean Victor Hum, from University of Toronto, Canada; Dr. Nabil El-Hinnawy at Tower Semiconductor, Newport Beach, CA, USA; Dr. Emily Naviasky a graduate student at University of California Berkeley, USA, when she performed her review and now, with IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA; and graduate student Ir. Marie Mertens from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium and Polytechnique Montréal, Canada.

Each of these individuals has received a special certificate of appreciation from the MTT Society and their names were announced in the January 2023 opening editorial of IEEE Journal of Microwaves. We repeat their names here so our entire society can celebrate their achievement and hopefully inspire other researchers to participate in this most important aspect of our peer review process. Photos of our winners appear below.