We are very sad to announce that Matt Wood is leaving us, after an incredible year working with Mekentosj. We can’t show any of the things he has been working on (except the new web site design of course!), but we can tell you it’s awesome, and we will very much miss him. We will miss his fantastic expertise and his great insights, and we will miss his energy, humour, and his guidance.

The good news is that Matt is joining the legendary Amazon Web Services team, as Technology Evangelist for Europe. It would be hard not to be excited for him at this great opportunity. Matt will remain a great friend for all the Mekentosj crew, and we wish him all the best in this new job.

As an ‘au revoir’, we leave him with this little movie where Charles expresses how each of us felt upon hearing the news:

Things are moving very quickly here at Mekentosj, and we’re very pleased to welcome two new members to the team!

Constantine Nicolaou, a long time collaborator of Matt from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is the newest member of the Mekentosj development team. Constantine is a software wizard, bringing with him a world of experience with scientific software, high quality tools and exquisite workflow designs.

Mark Bate joins as our new infrastructure guru and system architect. An expert in scientific distributed systems, Mark is responsible for designing, building and managing the largest Apple Xserve high performance cluster in the southern hemisphere. He joins us after a long stint at Monash University, and will be working from Melbourne, Australia.

You can read more about our new arrivals on the Mekentosj Profile pages.

The Mekentosj team is now distributed across 5 cities in 4 countries: a big thank you to everyone for all their support for Papers and Papers for iPhone. We love building software to help with your research, and look forward to even bigger things with our new team in the future.

Welcome aboard, Mark and Constantine!