In 2025, AOE reviewers continue to make outstanding contributions to the peer review process. They demonstrated professional effort and enthusiasm in their reviews and provided comments that genuinely help the authors to enhance their work.
Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding reviewers, with a brief interview of their thoughts and insights as a reviewer. Allow us to express our heartfelt gratitude for their tremendous effort and valuable contributions to the scientific process.
Matthew D. Stachler, Inova Schar Cancer Institute, USA
Matthew D. Stachler
Dr. Matthew D. Stachler is a Molecular Pathologist at the University of California San Francisco focused on personalized medicine in cancer diagnostics and treatment clinically. On the research side, his lab works to understand the process of premalignant progression to invasive cancer, specifically focusing on cancers (esophageal and gastric adenocarcinoma) and pre-malignant conditions (columnar and intestinal metaplasia or Barrett’s esophagus) of the upper gastrointestinal tract as a model system. Despite the understanding these cancers arise from a metaplastic field, they still do an extremely poor job of identifying patients early before advanced disease develops. They have taken the approach to first understand the factors important in human tissues through advanced ‘omics’ and digital imaging and then use this understanding to build model systems and functional studies. It is their goal to use the knowledge and understanding gained in these studies to develop novel biomarkers, screening strategies, and treatments to identify and treat people early before advanced disease develops. Learn more about Dr. Stachler here.
Dr. Stachler reckons that a healthy peer-review system involves the reviewers being fair but critical of the science and working with the authors to improve the manuscript for publication.
Dr. Stachler points out that it is important to recognize any potential biases and work with the editors to determine if reviewing the manuscript is still appropriate. Second, during the review, it is important to stick to the science and experiments being performed. Finally, whenever a review seems to be overly critical or supportive, it is important to take a step back and make sure all of the comments are well justified.
From a reviewer’s perspective, Dr. Stachler highlights that it is always important for authors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest (COI). This allows readers to judge on their own what influence they may have on the studies. Also, disclosing any COI early allows the authors to appear upfront and not like they are potentially hiding any influence. A COI can influence research in a variety of ways from subtle ways in which results are interpreted to more major issues such as pressure to falsify a study.
(by Lareina Lim, Brad Li)
