We are happy to announce that Torsten Mütze (left in the picture), assistant professor in the Theory and Foundations Research Division, has won the Best Paper Award at the 47th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2022) for the paper "The Hamilton compression of highly symmetric graphs", authored jointly with his student Arturo Merino (TU Berlin; middle) and Petr Gregor (Charles University Prague; right). The paper proposes a new graph parameter that measures the amount of symmetry present in its Hamilton cycles, and it investigates this parameter for a wide range of interesting highly-symmetric graphs. It combines methods from combinatorics, number theory and algebra, and connects the new parameter to several related problems that researchers have studied intensively. The MFCS best paper award is sponsored by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

We are happy to announce that Dr Dmitry Chistikov has been promoted to Associate Professor from 1 April 2022. Since joining Warwick in 2017, Dmitry has made a significant contribution to the department with his research, teaching, and administrative and supportive roles. Many congratulations to Dmitry for all his achievements!

We are pleased to report that members of the department's Theory and Foundations research theme have had four papers accepted to the 54th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2022), the ACM flagship conference in theoretical computer science. The papers are:

• "Deterministic Massively Parallel Connectivity" by Sam Coy and Artur Czumaj.
• "Improved Approximation Guarantees for Shortest Superstrings using Cycle Classification by Overlap to Length Ratios", by Matthias Englert, Nicolaos Matsakis, and Pavel Veselý.
• "Hypercontractivity on High Dimensional Expanders" by Tom Gur, Noam Lifshitz, and Siqi Liu.
• "Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions via Additive Combinatorics" by Vahid R. Asadi, Alexander Golovnev, Tom Gur, and Igor Shinkar.