 Hi, I'm Rita Strack. I'm a senior editor at Nature Methods. How I got here, I took a pretty traditional academic role. I did a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology where I worked on engineering fluorescent proteins for people to use in microscopy and imaging. And from there, I did a postdoc actually not too far away where I worked on fluorogenic aptomers for live cell imaging of RNA. So my background was always methods development and probes and I did a lot of microscopy. And when I found myself on the academic job market, I saw an ad available for an editor at Nature Methods and it was almost as if the ad was written for me. They wanted someone with expertise in fluorescence microscopy and fluorescence probes. So I applied and I learned about the job and what the career meant and I found it to be a very good fit. And so here I am, eight years later, still quite happy. I'd say I have two favorite parts of my job. The first is meeting scientists. I love traveling the world, hearing about the cutting edge research people are doing and all the stories behind the science and having this job has allowed me to develop a huge network of scientists and really see, generate a big picture view of science. And so that's a really fun part of being an editor. I also really like keeping up with cutting edge science in terms of what we read. And I guess there's a third thing. I find it very satisfying to see a paper come in and see how it develops through the process of peer review and editorial discretion and becomes the final Nature Methods paper that is ultimately made beautiful and published. I think seeing papers from front to end is really satisfying. The biggest challenge in my job is definitely rejecting papers. So I think I'm a people pleaser by nature, so it's very difficult for me to give decisions that I know will be disappointing to authors especially since I know every author is a real person with real feelings and rejection is painful. It's something I know myself from when I was a scientist and my own papers were rejected. The way I try to reduce this is just with communication. Even in what might seem to be a very templated email where we send a rejection decision, I try to tell the authors what I really liked about the paper, what I thought was strong about it, and then explain to them what my decision was about why, not that it shouldn't be published, but why it might not be a good fit for Nature Methods. And I hope by giving that little bit of information, explanation, it makes the decision not necessarily more comfortable for the authors but something that they can think about and at least understand that we read the paper carefully and gave it our full time and time. So I think that helps. So what are our editorial criteria at Nature Methods? We take a lot of things into consideration. We try to view each paper as a whole. One thing I think about when I'm reading every single paper is can you learn something new? So is the method enabling of new biological discovery? That's a core criteria for a paper we're going to publish. And then we also think we try to gauge whether it's a very innovative paper and obviously we prioritize innovation. And then we also think about who the readership is and if it's a broad readership. So is your method going to impact all of cell biology, all of neuroscience, or will it be a smaller niche or even a very specialized group of people? So those three things I think, does it let you do something new? Is it quite innovative? And will it reach a broad audience? Are our three primary criteria for Nature Methods?