Southampton physicist named Outstanding Referee by American Physical Society

Senior Researcher Andy O’Bannon has been selected as an Outstanding Referee for exceptional work in the assessment of manuscripts published in Physical Review journals.

Dr Andy O’Bannon, a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the University of Southampton’s department of Physics and Astronomy, is one of only 13 UK-based academics to be selected by the American Physical Society (APS) for 2017 as an Outstanding Referee for Physical Review journals.

Recognition in the Outstanding Referee programme is a lifetime honour, with 150 researchers named from 29 countries across the globe in 2017.

Dr O’Bannon says: "I am deeply honoured and humbled to be selected by the APS as an Outstanding Referee. I take refereeing very seriously, given that peer review is a central pillar of modern science, and indeed is one of the few concrete things we can point to that separates science from pseudo-science.

“The best refereeing should be sceptical and adversarial, but also fair and honest. The real goal is excellent science. The APS deserves credit for recognising referees’ efforts to maintain good scientific practice and uphold core scientific values."

Dr O’Bannon has been contributing to the Southampton Theory Astrophysics and Gravity (STAG) Research Centre since 2015, following research positions in Seattle and Munich as well as at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A leading expert in holography, his research is focused on strongly-interacting systems with unusual transport properties.

Professor Jonathan Flynn, Head of Department for Physics and Astronomy, adds: “It is fantastic to see Andy congratulated for his outstanding service to the physics community. His efforts not only maintain journal standards, but also help authors improve the quality and readability of their articles. He is an excellent ambassador for the University and richly deserves this recognition.”

The American Physical Society is a non-profit membership organisation working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through research journals, scientific meetings and international activities. Its Physical Review collection includes some of the most cited physics journals in the world.

This year’s selection in the Outstanding Referee programme was made from 30 years of records on over 57,000 referees who have been called upon to review manuscripts, including more than 35,000 that were submitted in 2016.