Cercia welcomes Dr Maolin Tang from the School of Software Engineering and Data Communications, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, who will work with us for two months on VLSI placement and routing algorithms suitable for nanoscale chips, especially FPGAs. Dr Tang’s research interests include Evolutionary Computation, Internet-Based Computation, Intelligent Approaches to VLSI Physical Design Automation and Evolvable Hardware. His homepage: http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~tangm/