Outstanding Postdoctoral Researcher Awards
The IAS would like to congratulate the first winners of our Outstanding Postdoctoral Researcher Award. The award has been created to recognise exceptional postdoctoral researchers who have made significant contributions both to research and to the wider postdoc community over the past year and shines a spotlight on the individuals whose work embodies the spirit of Warwick’s Research Strategy: ambitious, collaborative, impactful, and driven by a commitment to positive change.
We very much look forward to seeing how our winners continue to represent the postdoctoral community at Warwick over the next year, and we hope that details of next year’s nomination process will follow soon.
Dr Sally Holloway (History)
Dr Sally Holloway is a historian of gender, emotions, material culture, and everyday life in Britain from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. She is currently an AHRC-funded Research, Development and Engagement fellow in the History department, where she is undertaking her major new project "After Love" examining the history of romantic heartbreak as an embodied emotional experience. The project involves collaborating with community partners including the Poetry Pharmacy and mental health charity Mind, and will culminate in a Festival of Heartbreak at the OVADA gallery in Oxford later this year. In 2025-6, she led the Cabinets of Heartbreak project for undergraduate History students, for which participants designed their own museum-style displays on subjects such as the music of heartbreak, broken heart syndrome, and histories of divorce, widowhood, and LGBTQ heartbreaks. Students were also able to attend a talk on the principles of curating by Polly Putnam, Curator of Collections at Historic Royal Palaces, and run a special event on 'Happy Hearts and Sad Hearts' for the Institute of Engagement's Resonate Summer Festival. This year, Sally's research has featured in the New York Times, BBC Future, History.com (Sky History Channel), and in the British Academy's first public 'Salon' at Carlton House Terrace for their series "The Age of Self".
Dr Aditya Singh (Physics)
Dr Aditya Singh joined the University of Warwick as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in September 2023, with appointments in the Department of Physics and the Institute of Advanced Study. He is currently a Research Fellow in Physics, where his research focuses on the optical and electrical properties of 2D materials, epitaxial ferroelectric superlattices, and domain wall engineering in lithium niobate crystals. His work aims to develop novel material platforms for next-generation nanoelectronics and quantum technologies, enabling new approaches for information storage and processing.
Before joining Warwick, Dr Singh was a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (2022–2023). He completed his PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2022, where he developed and investigated 2D materials and heterostructures using chemical vapour deposition and crystal exfoliation.
Dr Singh has received several prestigious fellowships, including the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Raman-Charpak Fellowship (IPCMS-CNRS, France), the INSPIRE Fellowship, and the University Grants Commission Junior Research Fellowship. Alongside his research, he was actively involved in volunteering and community service through the National Cadet Corps (Indian Air Force) and the National Service Scheme.
Dr Linda Wanika (Engineering)
I am a postdoctoral researcher based in the School of Engineering who is interested in interdisciplinary health research. My main research vision is to develop a framework which incorporates overall health and society into predictive modelling for patients who are unfortunately misrepresented, neglected or excluded. This vision can only be achieved through the guidance, implementation and integration of different disciplines to account for the diverse areas of health and society.
In my current research post, I am part of the Horizon Europe ERAMET project which is an Ecosystem for Rapid Adoption of Modelling and Simulation Methods to Address Regulatory Needs in the Development of Orphan and Paediatric Medicines. My role in this project is to aid in assessments of the reliability models that are created and used to represent rare diseases in children as well as models that are used to predict suitable treatment options for children who suffer from rare diseases. I implement biology, engineering, mathematical and statistical methods in order to build the foundational knowledge about a rare disease, simulate a potential pathway and utilise available resources to simulate disease progression and treatment options.
Outside of my research post, I am also an associate fellow of the IAS, a British Pharmacology Society ambassador and a co-lead for the interdisciplinary health spotlight.