Next Editor-in-Chief of JCEP
The Clinical Exercise Physiology Association (CEPA) is excited to announce Neil Smart, PhD, as the next editor-in-chief (EIC) of the Journal of Clinical Exercise Physiology (JCEP). Professor Smart assumed this role on June 1, 2025. Professor Smart is an Exercise and Sport Science Australia (ESSA)–accredited exercise physiologist and ESSA fellow. He is currently professor of clinical exercise physiology at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. JCEP is an official publication of CEPA and ESSA, and the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology is a journal partner. JCEP was launched in 2012 by Dr. Jonathan Ehrman and Dr. Clinton Brawner and has a current readership of over 16,000. This change is historic for JCEP and it marks the first change of the EIC in its 14-year history. Below is a brief interview conducted by Dr. Ehrman so we can all learn a little more about Dr. Smart.
Hi Neil. Could you please provide a brief history of your youth leading up to going to university? What led you down this path?
When I was 16, I played soccer for a team made up of my schoolteachers, and eventually the team became all former students. But back in the team’s first season my physical education teacher asked one of the first exercise physiologists in the United Kingdom to play on the team. This guy, Dorian Dugmore, even though he was 20 years older than me, could still play and he provided assists for many goals I scored. Out of this was born a mentor-mentee relationship. Dorian had recently set up the first cardiac rehabilitation program in the UK and a few years later, after a summer coaching in Boston, I visited him in Toronto where he was leading a prestigious sports medicine center. After keeping my promise to him to obtain a master’s degree, Dorian helped me get my first job in the UK’s National Health Service and this set me on my current pathway.
What is (are) your research focus?
My primary focus is management of heart failure with exercise training with a secondary focus on the optimal use of exercise to manage the main cardiac risk factors, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and glucose control. I am particularly interested in people with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction as awareness of this condition, its diagnosis, and treatment are all relatively less compared to people with the better-known systolic dysfunction heart failure phenotype. Over the years I have become adept at conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Pooling data for meta-analyses has allowed me to answer some of the important questions around optimizing exercise prescription for people with heart disease using big datasets.
Where has your professional career taken you?
It has taken me to some very exciting places, and I have met some very famous and interesting people. I have travelled to many parts of the world, to places I would probably not have visited without achieving my career aspirations. I have conducted exercise tests on heads of state in Asia, I have worked with and played sport alongside elite sportspeople like Sir Vivian Richards and Sir Ian Botham. But what I am most proud of is the work we have conducted on exercise and the impact it has on globally recognizing the antihypertensive benefit of physical exercise.
What do you hope to accomplish as EIC of JCEP? Do you anticipate any changes in the format of JCEP?
The main hope is that JCEP will become a citation indexed journal in the next 1 to 2 years. Jon Ehrman (outgoing JCEP EIC) and Webb Smith (current CEPA Publications Committee chair) have been working hard on this and we are close to Web of Science indexing. I do note that we are currently indexed with Google Scholar. This will very quickly improve both the number and the quality of JCEP submissions. I also wish to increase readership of the journal, especially beyond the USA, Australia, and Canada. I would like JCEP to be known as the global journal for those practicing clinical exercise physiology.
I don’t see any immediate need to change JCEP’s format, but in future, indexing and submission volume dependent, we may increase either the number of issues or papers per issue or both. We may also run some special-topic editions.