Her face has never appeared in this newsletter, as far as we can tell after rummaging through the archives, but her presence has been felt on every page for many years. Usually the staff of the Office of Information and Public Affairs (OIPA) remains behind the scenes as it manages EMBL’s internal and external information. In this case we have to make an exception: Sarah Sherwood, former editor of EMBL&cetera, left the Lab at the beginning of December to start a family and take up a new position in Spain. We thought we’d better tell you where to find her when all of your e-mails bounce.

Sarah joined OIPA in March 1999 to help out with all of the office’s tasks and assist Halldór Stefánsson with the new Science and Society programme. On her first day she was plunged into the process of the annual report and given responsibility for planning a major EMBL alumni meeting, which saw the launch of the Alumni Association.

That went so well, she was given most of the association’s administrative tasks. As well as setting up the alumni network, she coordinated the tracking down of over 3,700 alumni who have dispersed throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The task honed her detective skills, so if you leave EMBL for a sheep farm in the Outback and think you’re safe, think again.

She quickly took on the production of the Research Reports and most other OIPA documents; she has been a main contributor to the Annual Report, doing its complete layout for a couple of years; she helped put together the grant that established the ELLS, etc., etc. The DG Office quickly discovered her talents, so when the Lab decided to hold an Open House in 2003, for the first time in 15 years, it was obvious she’d be involved.

Sarah really found her pace with EMBL&cetera. “EMBL was lacking a central means of communication for the five sites of the Lab and the extended community,” she says. “In setting up the newsletter, we were given a great deal of freedom to think outside the box. We could carefully reflect on its functions, were encouraged to be very creative, and received a great amount of support from the DG Office, EMBL’s scientists, the Photolab, IT Services and many, many others.

“Creating a newsletter aimed at the internal and external communities, alumni and our member states gave us a very interesting perspective: it was clear that good external relations depended on good internal communications. Sites and programmes needed effective channels to speak to each other. This was working well scientifically, but the Lab is a lot more complex, and the whole community needed to become involved.”

Still, she says, the newsletter has limits of time and space: EMBL has much greater needs in terms of internal communication. Several years ago she made a sketch for a web-based information service called “Today at EMBL”. The project has been taken over by Sarah’s successor, Vienna Leigh, and the web team. “Vienna is also doing the newsletter now and I’m very pleased to be leaving these projects in such competent hands,” Sarah says.

She’ll be sorely missed by practically everybody – EMBL staff and a lot of visitors, including external participants in several volunteer projects that she organised. One of those involved cleaning up the nearby “Waldpiraten” camp, where the German Children’s Cancer Foundation runs summer camps and other activities. “These events showed that EMBL’s staff has a lot of energy and enthusiasm for meaningful “extracurricular” projects, even when they involve hard work,” Sarah says. “Events like this attract everybody, and are enormously important in drawing the community together: scientists, the many non-scientists who work here, and their families.”

We’ll miss her tireless energy and dogged attention to detail, to which much of OIPA’s success can be attributed. Those qualities will serve her well as she joins a new scientific institute in Barcelona to head communications and outreach activities. We wish her all the best.

Russ Hodge