We have three people joining Joel’s lab in one week this week. First up, we have Mehdi Sharifitabar who hails from Iran and is starting his PhD. Taylor Szyszka (whose surname would surely win you a game of Scrabble if you could only spell it) is also a new PhD student – fresh from her degree at U Arizona. Finally Dr Jason Schmidberger wings his way to us from postdoctoral stints in Europe and will be our new resident crystallographer. In good lab tradition, we will immediately retrain him in something else, but he’ll still be around to help you with your crystallography stuff. Please introduce yourself to them if you see them around.