The Department will be welcoming Dr Laurent Doyen of CNRS and ENS Paris-Saclay as a Rutherford Visiting Fellow in 2018/19. This prestigious funding, whose aim is to attract top global talent into the UK, will allow Dr Doyen to collaborate closely with Dr Laure Daviaud, Dr Marcin Jurdzinski and Dr Ranko Lazic of DIMAP, as well as Dr Nathanael Fijalkow of the Alan Turing Institute, on cutting-edge research on fast algorithms for synthesis of safe, smart and adaptive controllers.

Professor Graham Cormode, the University of Warwick and Alan Turing Institute Liaison Director, commented:

Dr Doyen's Rutherford Visiting Fellowship will provide a major boost to building world-leading and long-lasting collaborative links among the Alan Turing Institute, the DIMAP multi-disciplinary research centre at Warwick, and LSV at ENS Paris-Saclay. The latter is an established European centre of excellence in logical aspects of computer and data sciences.

Prof Till Bretschneider has been successful with a £0.5M BBSRC grant application ‘Reconstructing cell surface dynamics from lightsheet microscopy data’ and will work with a team at MRC LMB Cambridge (Dr Rob Kay) and the Warwick Medical School (Prof Andrew McAinsh and Dr Karuna Sampath) on this research from October 2017. They will develop new image-based computational modelling tools to investigate the biochemical regulation and physical forces that shape the cell membrane during cell motility and uptake of fluid. Both are important processes in embryonic development, tumour metastasis, and the immune response. The work will benefit from state of the art microscopy in Warwick’s Advanced Bioimaging Research Technology Platform that allows to acquire time series of 3D scans of single cells at high spatial and temporal resolution.

Dr Ranko Lazic has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the 2017/18 academic year, to work on the Petri nets reachability conjecture.

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are one of the most prominent models of concurrency, and their study is a vibrant research area. They have been used to discover bugs and eliminate vulnerabilities in network protocols, concurrent software, business processes, hardware circuits, and control systems.

Professor Artur Czumaj, head of the Foundations of Computer Science research group, has commented:

This prestigious fellowship will further strengthen the internationally leading research in theoretical computer science at Warwick, which recently has been also greatly boosted by the new permanent appointments of Dr Sayan Bhattacharya and Dr Dmitry Chistikov.