This year, we are delighted to welcome the stem cell community to the annual ISSCR meeting in our “home town” of Boston. The ISSCR last chose Boston as a venue for its meeting 9 years ago, when the society and the meeting were considerably smaller, so we are very excited to see the meeting back here now that it has grown into such an impressive and multifaceted event. In the registration bag this year, instead of a copy of our June issue, meeting attendees will find a variation on the popular “Best Of” reprint collection series focusing on Cell Stem Cell articles published in 2012. This collection will also be available in an extended version as an online digital edition, so even if you are not coming to Boston for the meeting this year, you will be able to browse and enjoy the full collection at your leisure.For the review feature in our June issue, we have chosen to focus on the application of stem cells to therapeutic discovery through a series of Perspectives from leaders in the field in the areas of disease modeling and application. In one of these articles, Florian Merkle and Kevin Eggan discuss disease modeling using human iPSCs, and in a second, Dinesh Puppala and Sandra Engle cover the integration of human pluripotent stem cells into drug discovery programs. The third article, from Fred Gage and colleagues, covers the application of iPSCs to devising treatments for neurological disease, while the fourth, from Jessica Garbern and Richard Lee, looks at cardiac regeneration. Together, these articles give a timely update on some of the key areas of development for the stem cell field. They also form a prelude for other events scheduled for later this year, particularly a Cell Symposium on “Using Stem Cells to Model and Treat Human Disease,” being held in Los Angeles in November. Between now and the Symposium, there will be two focused webinars on related topics, so look out for news about these soon as well. To complement this review feature, for our cover we have chosen a painting entitled “Popred” by the artist Sarah Ezekiel, who is connected to the theme of the issue through MND/ALS, one of the diseases that forms a focus of discovery efforts.This year also sees some important developments for Cell Stem Cell and the ISSCR. One of the most significant is that we are excited to welcome a new journal into the stem cell fold: Stem Cell Reports, which launches in June and at the ISSCR meeting. You will find a copy of the inaugural issue of this journal in your registration bag along with the Cell Stem Cell “Best Of” collection. Stem Cell Reports is a new journal owned and run by the ISSCR and published by Cell Press, and it has a distinguished editorial team led by Christine Mummery. With its open-access model and focus on concise papers, Stem Cell Reports will be a valuable complement to Cell Stem Cell for the publication of important studies in the stem cell field. The scope, focus, and emphasis of Cell Stem Cell will not change: it will continue to be owned and run by Cell Press and affiliated with the ISSCR. However, the ISSCR pages and articles that previously appeared in Cell Stem Cell have now instead moved to Stem Cell Reports, along with oversight by the ISSCR Scientific Director, Heather Rooke.At Cell Stem Cell, earlier this year we were very happy to add a new member to our in-house editorial team, Jonathan Saxe, who joined us from a postdoctoral position in Haifan Lin’s group at Yale University. This month, we have also made some changes to the organization and membership of our advisory editorial board. In keeping with our updated relationship with the ISSCR, the Cell Stem Cell ISSCR advisory board members (Arnold Kriegstein, Haifan Lin, Toshio Suda, and Leonard Zon) have transferred over to become part of the main Cell Stem Cell editorial board. They are joined on the board by 16 additional new members, all of whom we are delighted to welcome to our team: Iannis Aifantis, Caroline Alexander, Hans Clevers, Hongkui Deng, Elaine Dzierzak, Richard Gilbertson, Konrad Hochedlinger, Craig Jordan, Hanna Mikkola, Huck Hui Ng, Stuart Orkin, Emmanuelle Passegue, Kathrin Plath, Yoshiki Sasai, Deepak Srivastava, and Mervin Yoder. At the same time, we are bidding a fond farewell to Thomas Laux, Angela McNab, and Shinichi Nishikawa, and we thank them for all of their efforts and contributions over the past 6 years. Several of our new editorial board members have contributed to a Voices article in this issue, in which they prepared a short piece about a 2012 Cell Stem Cell paper that they particularly enjoyed. I hope you in turn will enjoy reading these diverse perspectives on a broad range of studies, and that doing so will perhaps encourage you to go back and revisit some of the papers with a fresh eye. The topics covered in these highlights range from chromatin regulation in ESCs (Brookes et al., 2012xBrookes, E., de Santiago, I., Hebenstreit, D., Morris, K.J., Carroll, T., Xie, S.Q., Stock, J.K., Heidemann, M., Eick, D., Nozaki, N. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 157–170Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (82)See all ReferencesBrookes et al., 2012) through morphogenesis (Nakano et al., 2012xNakano, T., Ando, S., Takata, N., Kawada, M., Muguruma, K., Sekiguchi, K., Saito, K., Yonemura, S., Eiraku, M., and Sasai, Y. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 771–785Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (210)See all ReferencesNakano et al., 2012) and lineage contribution (van Amerongen et al., 2012xvan Amerongen, R., Bowman, A.N., and Nusse, R. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 387–400Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (118)See all Referencesvan Amerongen et al., 2012) to the ways in which stem cell regulation contributes to hematopoietic disease and cancer (Ceccaldi et al., 2012xCeccaldi, R., Parmar, K., Mouly, E., Delord, M., Kim, J.M., Regairaz, M., Pla, M., Vasquez, N., Zhang, Q.S., Pondarre, C. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 36–49Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (73)See all ReferencesCeccaldi et al., 2012; Magee et al., 2012xMagee, J.A., Ikenoue, T., Nakada, D., Lee, J.Y., Guan, K.L., and Morrison, S.J. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 415–428Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (58)See all ReferencesMagee et al., 2012; Kalaitzidis et al., 2012xKalaitzidis, D., Sykes, S.M., Wang, Z., Punt, N., Tang, Y., Ragu, C., Sinha, A.U., Lane, S.W., Souza, A.L., Clish, C.B. et al. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 11: 429–439Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (59)See all ReferencesKalaitzidis et al., 2012). This Voices article is also included in the “Best Of” collection as a complement to the selection of articles based on downloads, and all of the papers featured in the selections are included in the extended online edition.If you are coming to Boston for the 2013 ISSCR meeting, we hope you will have time to visit our booth in the exhibit hall (#627). You will be able to pick up a free copy of this June issue, an extra “Best Of” if you’d like one, plus many of the other journals in the Cell Press family, including Cell Reports, our broad scope open-access journal launched last year. You could also learn about our other planned activities, including the conference and webinars mentioned above, and meet editors from Cell Stem Cell and other Cell Press journals to get an inside look at the publishing process. We will have information about the new Cell Press full text and Snapshot iPad apps, and you will have a chance to try them out at the booth. At Cell Stem Cell, we have continued to expand our social media presence, and before and during the meeting we will post news and information via Twitter (@CellStemCell or https://twitter.com/cellstemcell) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cellstemcell). Don’t forget to enter the Cell Press “Boston Experience” competition by sending us a photo of yourself at a Boston landmark (and yes, the convention center does count!) via social media or email for your chance to win an iPad Mini or a scarf featuring “Popred,” the painting that graces the cover of this issue and, if you are fortunate enough to win, could soon be gracing you.In closing, and unfortunately on a more somber note, I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Dr. Christa Muller-Sieburg, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Dr. Muller-Sieburg made many pioneering contributions to studies of HSCs, and particularly, as Connie Eaves and colleagues outlined in their Perspective article last year (Copley et al., 2012xCopley, M.R., Beer, P.A., and Eaves, C.J. Cell Stem Cell. 2012; 10: 690–697Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (69)See all ReferencesCopley et al., 2012), to initial investigations of HSC heterogeneity that formed a foundation for current and future analyses. Her influence will no doubt be evident in HSC work presented at this year’s ISSCR meeting. I am sure I speak for the entire Cell Stem Cell team when I say that we look forward to sharing all of our stem cell experiences with you, at this meeting and beyond. As always, we welcome your feedback and input about the journal and the field overall.