We are pleased to welcome Dean Smith who joins us as a beamline scientist after a stint at UNLV as a post-doctoral researcher. Dean will continue to work on his passion of pushing the limits of in-situ and ex-situ laser heating, Raman spectroscopy and chemical reactivity at extreme pressure-temperature conditions. In addition, Dean will be working on supporting our user community at beamlines and in our offline laboratories.  Dean was selected after an extensive search and we are very glad we could attract his talent. He is the current chair of GRS and is organizing this year’s seminar on High Pressure at Holderness (https://www.grc.org/research-at-high-pressure-conference/2020/).