Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today the next winner in the New York City Applied Sciences Initiative.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an applied science research institute which will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly with a consortium of world-class universities including The University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, The City University of New York, The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and The University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO, and AECOM.

Warwick Computer Science will play a significant role in CUSP, with new and existing academics providing research and teaching in areas including operations research, service computing, complexity theory, networking and communications, data analytics, modelling and visualisation.

The completed institute will host 50 faculty and researchers and over 500 masters-level and PhD students. Students and staff from Warwick Computer Science will be able to engage in urban sciences projects in the New York ‘living lab’, in areas including smart buildings, digital healthcare, transport solutions, and public safety.

The Centre will open its doors to its first class of Warwick-CUSP students in September 2013.

For more information see:

1. http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announce
2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_only_european/
3. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/04/urban-science-centre-born-in-the-big-apple.html

Recent results on the Unistats official website show that of those Computer Science graduates from Warwick, who have gained employment 6 months after graduation, 100% are in working in graduate level employment.

Warwick Computer Science is in the top tier of computer science departments (with four other universities) with respect to graduate employability. It is also the second most targeted by graduate employers for graduate recruitment programmes in the UK - second only to Cambridge.

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.)