Starting in July, pioneering and award-winning HIV/AIDS researcher Dr. Jeffrey Laurence of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University will take over as editor in chief of the newly renamed monthly journal Translational Research, the official journal of the Central Society for Clinical Research.

The journal has been published for the past 90 years as the Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine.

"The journal's name change reflects the scientific establishment's new focus on bench-to-bedside research -- making sure that discoveries in the laboratory are quickly and easily translated to therapies that are of real benefit to patients," said Laurence, professor of medicine in hematology-oncology at Weill Cornell and attending physician and infectious disease authority at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He is also director of Weill Cornell's Laboratory for AIDS Virus Research.

Sixteen years ago he started The AIDS Reader, which rapidly became the world's largest-circulation AIDS journal. Laurence also took over as editor in chief of AIDS Patient Care and STDs in 1996, quadrupling its "science-citation index" (a marker of the journal's academic influence) during his first four years at the helm. As a researcher focused on HIV/AIDS, Laurence was lead author of the seminal 1984 New England Journal of Medicine study pinpointing HIV as the cause of AIDS and defining a carrier state for the virus.