Professor Jianfeng Feng from the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

The Wolfson Research Merit Award is one of the most prestigious UK awards, supported by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science. The scheme provides up to 5 years’ funding after which the award holder continues with a permanent post at the host university. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract to this country or to retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence and the focus of the award is a salary enhancement. More information is available from http://www.wolfson.org.uk.

Professor Feng will be working on a project entitled "Bridging the gap between fMRI and Genome-wide data with applications in diseases".

News on some of Professor Feng's more recent work can be found at: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/04/health/depressed-brains-hate-differently/?hpt=he_c2

(See also The Royal Society announcement.)

Dr Amin Coja-Oghlan, Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Computer Science and Warwick Mathematics Instititue, has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.

ERC Starting Grant is one of the most prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council for world-class researchers, and Amin is one of the very few researchers in Warwick to receive this grant. His new ERC Starting Grant, worth over a million of euros for the period of five years, has been awarded for his project »Phase Transitions and Computational Complexity«.

Dr Coja-Oghlan's main research area is in the Theoretical Computer Science, with special focus on the study of Algorithms and Complexity via rigorous mathematical methods, on the boundary of computing, combinatorics, and probability. He published pver 30 papers in refereed journals (eight as a sole author) and a similar number of papers in the proceedings of international Computer Science conferences. He is the winner or the EATCS Award for the best paper in Track A at the 36th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2009), and he has been an invited speaker at numerous international conferences in computer science and in mathematics.

Dr Sara Kalvala has been awarded a grant towards developing tools for Synthetic Biology. The multidisciplinary project, funded by EPSRC and involving colleagues from Nottingham and Sheffield, aims at developing programmable defensive bacterial coatings and skins.

Scientific and technical advances mean that it is practically feasible to insert external genes into bacteria; the difficulty is in making sure the modified bacteria do something useful. For this, it is useful to approach the cell as a machine and its genetic engine as made up of brick-like components that can be combined in different ways. This is the idea behind the new and exciting discipline of Synthetic Biology.

Sara's experience in compilers and formal logics will inform the development of tools which will help assemble genetic networks and model their interactions with host genes. Then, the whole procedure to perform this genetic engineering in an efficient and robust way will be addressed. Then we will be ready to actually manipulate the bacteria and create useful bacterial coatings and skins.

The project is due to start in early 2012, and research staff will be recruited at all three sites. At Warwick we will be looking for a post-doctoral researcher with expertise in both computer science and biology. For further information please contact Sara Kalvala.