Dear all, we would like to introduce to you the promovendiraad, consisting of Levi Klempner, Firdaous Oueslati and Tineke Rooijakkers (chairperson). We are the official representatives of the PhDs of LUIRS, and we will be promoting their interests within the department. Throughout the course of this year, we will be organising a number of activities that we hope will prove useful for the writing of a dissertation and might also provide some necessary social distraction. More importantly, to facilitate interaction and the exchange of information among PhD’s, we have formed a Facebook group. On this group page PhDs can ask questions, raise issues, post interesting conferences or workshops, and so on. Of course, we can also be reached via email, so if there are any questions or complaints let us know, because we hope to make doing your PhD just a little easier.