It’s official, on 1 February I will start my ERC Starting Grant project as a tenure track Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Meanwhile I will be Honorary Researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center. In the context of my project I will hire two PhD students and two postdocs. I expect to start advertising positons halfway 2019, so stay tuned!

An unfortunate Triturus embryo, experiencing the arrested development that is associated with the balanced lethal system that is shared by all Triturus species, known as ‘chromosome 1 syndrome’. This picture is by Michael Fahrbach and taken from his recent book (Fahrbach & Gerlach (2018) The genus Triturus).