Dr James Kermode has been appointed as the new Director of the Warwick Centre for Predictive Modelling (WCPM, https://warwick.ac.uk/wcpm). Dr Kermode is a Reader in the School of Engineering, and also co-directs the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Modelling of Heterogeneous Systems (HetSys).

WCPM is a Category III University Departmental Research Centre with interdisciplinary links to other departments in the Science Faculty, and is active across a number of modelling domains linked by their usage of techniques from Bayesian statistics such as uncertainty quantification and predictive modelling. It was founded in 2014 with support from EPSRC and has been strengthened by recent academic appointments including joint positions with the departments of Physics and Mathematics, as well as by its strong links to HetSys.

Speaking of his appointment, Dr Kermode said: "“I am very pleased to be taking on the role of Director of Warwick Centre for Predictive Modelling. This comes at an exciting time for the Centre, due to the ever-increasing prominence of data-driven and machine learning approaches across many domains of modelling in science and engineering. In WCPM, our focus will remain on making predictions from computer models useful and interpretable. Increasingly, this relies on quantifying the uncertainty in model outputs due to our imprecise knowledge of the form and parameters of the model, for example by running ensembles of simulations rather than using a single set of fixed parameters. There is a timely opportunity to capitalise on the soon-to-be-launched HPC Midlands+ Sulis Tier 2 facility which has been purpose-built for the ensemble computing workflows needed for uncertainty quantification. Activities in WCPM and in the EPSRC Centre for Modelling of Heterogenous Systems will benefit enormously from this new facility.”