Katja Guschanski obtained her PhD in 2009 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology working in the group of Linda Vigilant on population genetics of wild mountain gorillas. Since then she has worked as a postdoc at the Imperial College London looking at the factors affecting speciation in a group of African primates, the guenons. Katja is joining Henrik Kaessmann’s lab on December 1st 2010. Her new project here will focus on processes of gene origination in a number of mammalian lineages.