We congratulate our recent PhD students on winning Faculty Thesis Prizes. The winners are (in alphabetical order):

Dr Stephen Cantrell (supervised by Richard Sharp)

Dr Christopher Davis, (supervised by Kat Rock )

Dr Christophoros Panagiotis (supervised by Agelos Georgakopoulos)

Professor Matt Keeling has been awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List `for services to SAGE during the COVID response'.

Professor Keeling (Director of SBIDER here in Warwick) has been recognized for his major contributions to the national COVID response as a leading member of the SAGE and SPI (M) groups. We are proud of the contribution that Matt, along with the other Warwick members of SPI (M) (Louise Dyson, Ed Hill and Mike Tildesley) have made, both directly and through the Warwick Model.

Congratulations to Karen Vogtmann for election to Fellow of the Royal Society for her exceptional contributions to science.

The full citation reads:

Vogtmann played a major role in shaping Geometric Group Theory. She was a pioneer of the modern approach to automorphism groups of free groups, one of the richest interfaces of geometry and group theory. She established an agenda that has guided spectacular developments in the field for thirty years, promoting the powerful analogy between automorphism groups of free groups, mapping class groups of surfaces, and arithmetic lattices in semisimple Lie groups. Her 1986 paper with Culler on moduli of graphs is a founding document, and her fundamental work on the cohomology of Out(F) and homology stability are landmarks in the field.

Learn more from the Royal Society about this year's new Fellows and Karen's biography.

Congratulations to Oleg Pikhurko for being awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant. These grants fund leading researchers across Europe. The grant 'Finite and Descriptive Combinatorics', will expand the existing connections and build new bridges between distinct areas of mathematics focusing on combinatorial-type structures.

See the press release for further details.

Congratulations to Warwick's University Challenge team on their victory in the 2021 University Challenge Grand Final. The Warwick team, comprised of Richard Pollard, George Braid, Owain Burrell, and captained by mathematics PhD student Andrew Rout, defeated Magdalene College, Cambridge. When Andrew is not competing in University Challenge, he is researching nonlinear dispersive PDEs and many-body quantum problems.