The Moffat Charitable Trust recently donated £75,000 to the Unit, to fund a PhD student in Dario Alessi's laboratory, researching an area of diabetes. Abdallah Al-Hakim has been appointed to the studentship. Born in Egypt, Abdallah's family moved to Canada when he was 13 and he is now a Canadian citizen. Abdallah was previously an undergraduate at Toronto University, Canada, where he carried out important research in the laboratory of Bernard Schimmer on adenylate cyclases, which led to publication of a first authored paper in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology while still an undergraduate. He started his project in Dundee on 23 January 2004 working on the function of the novel AMPK-related kinases, which are activated by the LKB1 tumour suppressor protein kinase.