Jacob Thastrup, working in Dario Alessi's lab, has been awarded a PhD for work carried out on analysis of the function and regulation of WNK isoforms. Pictured is Jacob next to his parents, Ole and Lise Birgitte, and his examiners Dr Pat Eyers, YCR Institute for Cancer Studies, University of Sheffield and Stuart Wilson, maternal and Child Health Sciences, Ninewells Hospital and Medical School.

To our knowledge this is the first time that the parents of the candidate have attended a PhD viva seminar. Jacob's father is a well-known Danish entrepreneur having founded several biotech companies and was also one of the first people to realise the potential of the green fluorescent protein as a tool to study protein cellular localisation. Most impressively Jacob's dad asked Jacob the hardest and most probing question at the end of the viva seminar. By all accounts after the seminar Jacob was given quite a grilling by his examiners, who asked him a very wide-ranging series of questions on the nuts and bolts of protein kinases and physiology of salt transport. After nearly 4 hours he eventually passed and celebrations commenced.