The lead article for this issue of EJAM is Prof. Bernard J. Matkowsky's personalized survey-style article on the theory and application of singular perturbation methods to noisy dynamical systems in the limit of small noise. This article is based on his John von Neumann Prize lecture presented at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Meeting in July 2017. The John von Neumann Lecture is awarded by SIAM for outstanding and distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathematical sciences and for the effective communication of these ideas to the community. From 1990–1996, Matkowsky was an inaugural editorial board member for EJAM.