Scarlet Hao is the 2020 recipient of the Brewster Scholarship, which is awarded to an SLS PhD student in their second year of research whose work relates to crop improvement. Scarlet is supervised by Dr Guy Barker and her project is on Fungal Bioconversion. Find out more

Congratulations to third year Biochemistry student Katie Savva who has won the UKSEDS (UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) Outreach Ambassador of the Year award.

As part of a monthly series featuring the eight finalists in the 2020 BBC Gardeners World Magazine Gardens of the Year competition, Andy Gladman, a Crop Centre PhD student and his Leamington Spa ornamental allotment were the subject of March's edition. Find out more

Congratulations to Adrian Racovita, a fourth year BioMedical Science Mbio student, for his achievements over the last year.

• In March 2020, Adrian won Best Presentation at the Posters in Parliament (PiP) competition for his poster entitled 'Bacterial Neural Networks: Evolutionary Game Theory' (photo above).
• In August, he published a first author paper in Biochemical Society Transactions on 'Reinforcement learning in synthetic gene circuits'.
• Adrian also published a first author paper in the conference proceedings of the International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA) on 'Bacteria mastering the tic-tac-toe game through synthetic adaptive gene circuits'. 
• In December, with the Jaramillo group, Adrian presented at The 1st International BioDesign Research Conference on 'Engineering adaptive gene circuits in bacteria mastering game playing by reinforcement learning'. Find out about the conference
• Adrian has also been commissioned by the Science Committee of the Romanian Academy to write an article.

Third year Biochemistry student Katie Savva and 3 other students from Cambridge, Nottingham, and Georgia Tech Universities have been accepted onto the European Space Agency’s Spin Your Thesis 2021 campaign, carrying out research into the movement of nutrients into vesicles under hypergravity. The NOAHS ARC team will travel to ESTEC in Noordwijk, Netherlands, in September to use the Large Diameter Centrifuge there. YouTube interview(6 Feb 2021)

You might also like to listen to an interview Katie recently gave about her interest in biochemistry, space and quidditch! YouTube interview (6 Feb 2021)

The Warwick Institute of Engagement (WIE) is delighted to announce the appointment of 38 Foundation Fellows, 27 Honorary Fellows and 32 Associate Fellows.

Undergraduate Jerry Yu explains how he got involved:
'Hi, my name is Jerry Yu, I’m currently a second year Biochemistry student and I’m also a fellow of WIE. Engagement is all about sharing your passion with others. As a life sciences student, my passion lies in bioscience. However, I first discovered my eagerness for sharing as an Outreach Officer for Warwick BioSoc.The goal of this position was to spread enthusiasm towards life sciences around the local community and that is what I did I organised talks and even designed and taught life sciences lessons to primary school children. As a result of my work, I was recommended by a professor to apply to be a WIE fellow. I applied and here I am now. Engagement is important as it inspires and allows others to make informed decisions about what they enjoy. As a WIE fellow, I will be working to improve how engagement is done in the university and create more engagement opportunities which are welcoming and interesting especially in the current pandemic. More importantly, I would like to inspire you to share your passions with others. Afterall, what is life without a little bit of spice.'

Eight other members of SLS have also secured fellowships:
Honorary Fellows - Kevin Moffat, Rebecca Freeman
Foundation Fellows - Cansu Kuey, Ian Hands-Portman, Rachael Kirwan
Associate Fellows - Ellie Jameson, Eric Holub and Freya Harrison

Future Leader to Watch is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of Reviews published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Dr Fabrizio Alberti is first author on ‘Recent developments of tools for genome and metabolome studies in basidiomycete fungi and their application to natural product research’, published in BiO.
Read the interview