The Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire is pleased to announce the arrival of its newest staff member, Dr Stephanie Courty. Stephanie completed her PhD in Paris in 2002 in the field of computational cosmmology and galaxy formation, and is an acknowledged expert in thermodynamical evolution of gas within a cosmological context. Stephanie joins Prof Brad Gibson and the rapidly growing Galaxy Formation Group at UCLan, having recently completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Iceland, where she was responsible for some of the first numerical simulations of host galaxies of ultra-powerful gamma-ray bursts.