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Warwick Medical School academic wins prestigious ASME inclusive medical education award

Congratulations to Emily Róisín Reid, Associate Professor and Director of Student Experience, Employability and Progression at Warwick Medical School, on being named the 2026 recipient of the ASME Chair’s Award for Distinguished HPE Scholarship.

The Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) was impressed with Emily’s decade-long dedication to inclusive education and widening participation which has had a transformative impact on thousands of students and educators. From securing vital student bursaries to leading large-scale anti-racism initiatives, they felt her work perfectly exemplifies the leadership and innovation this award celebrates.

Reflecting on her achievement Emily said “I’m honoured to receive this award, which recognises the important work that colleagues, students and I have worked so hard for over the past decade to make our curricula and learning environments inclusive, equitable and innovative. I’d like to thank all of the amazing colleagues and students that I’ve collaborated with on the many, many projects and initiatives.”

Professor Gavin Perkins, Dean of Medicine said, “Congratulations on receiving this well-deserved award, Emily. Your commitment alongside the collective efforts of your colleagues ensure Warwick Medical School continues to lead the way in inclusive medical education.”

Warwick Medical School students have achieved the highest overall score in the 2026 Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh National Surgical Skills Competition.

We are delighted to announce that Professor Sophie Staniszewska has been awarded the highly prestigious NIHR Senior Investigator award.

A focused scientific meeting on cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors - the cellular machinery that drives cell division, cell migration and the motility and correct distribution of organelles. The programme will include inspiring keynotes from Joe Howard and Kristen Verhey, and provide many speaking opportunities for postdocs and students. Further, we will celebrate the career of Rob Cross and his contributions to kinesin and tubulin biophysics as he transitions into life as Emeritus Professor. The event will also be available via Livestream.

Kinesin molecular motors step directionally along microtubules inside cells, hauling molecular cargoes. This is fundamental to the way cells organise themselves and is crucially important, for example. for brain function. Karnawat et al use single molecule optical trapping to show that replacing kinesin's ATP chemical fuel with ATPγS, in which just one oxygen atom of ATP is replaced with a sulphur, still allows stepping but defeats most of its directional bias. Asking why reveals the mechanism of directional stepping in unprecedented detail.
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Colocalisation in microscopy is notoriously difficult to quantify. Here, we applied a new statistical method using the Earth mover's distance to analyse microscopy movies of microtubule-associated proteins moving inside cells. The work was done by Tom Honnor in Julia Brettschneider's group in Statistics in collaboration with the Royle lab in BMS.

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Defining the critical VT substrate has been a major focus of R&D teams globally. The importance of functional substrate identification has been reported by several world-renowned groups. However, as we move towards implementation, standardisation of functional extra-stimulus mapping is required. Our work just published in JACC Journals attempts to address this.

What are the important electrogram features that provide the greatest accuracy in defining the VT isthmus?

This international, multicentre study provides insights important to consider as we work towards automation of the approach.

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A new Warwick Medical School study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service, has started patient recruitment, potentially offering a solution to improve access to obesity care across the NHS.

Find out more about how W8Buddy began in this BBC news clip

Dr Thomas Barber has been recognised by ‘Scholar GPSLink opens in a new window’ as highly ranked scholar in field of obesity for the last 5 years, placed in the top 0.05% of all scholars in the specialty worldwide, and ranked number 37Link opens in a new window in the world.

The paper describes the development of ShapeSpaceExplorer, an interactive software package that makes it easy to analyse cell morphology without any prior knowledge of relevant shape features and in particular enables tracking how cell shape changes dynamically. At the core of our software is a new and efficient method to measure the similarity of two shapes. Pairwise distances from all shapes in the dataset are used to position each shape in a low-dimensional map of shape space. The user can explore this shape space and visualise average shapes from any region of interest, partition shape space to analyse shape distributions from different experimental conditions or measure the speed of shape changes between two regions of shape space. We also show that shape dynamics information is sufficient to predict when migrating cells change direction.
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The University of Warwick has announced the launch of a new spin-out company, VerIQ Limited, to transform how medical device and health technology clinical trials are designed, initiated and delivered across the UK.

Warwick Medical School has officially launched its Community First Responder scheme, part of the wider regional scheme led by West Midlands Ambulance Service University NHS Foundation Trust.

Our final-year medical students had an invaluable opportunity to deepen their understanding of a wide range of rheumatology conditions recently through a direct patient interaction day of teaching.

Congratulations to MB ChB student Grace Fisher, who has been named joint winner of the 2025 Medical Student Essay Prize from the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Perinatal Psychiatry.

Congratulations to the Dean of Warwick Medical School, Professor Gavin Perkins, who has received the Resuscitation Science Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. This prestigious award recognises Gavin’s significant contributions to resuscitation research, including leading major trials evaluating mechanical chest compression devices, adrenaline and intraosseous vascular access.

Three Warwick Medical School academics have been named in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researcher List 2025.

StayRose: a photostable StayGold derivative red-shifted by genetic code expansion was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry last week by a team of scientists from the groups of Mohan Balasubramanian (WMS), Masanori Mishima (WMS), Allister Crow (SLS), Falk Schneider (WMS), Abhishek Kumar (Marine Biological Laboratory) and Lijiang Song (Warwick Chemistry), funded by a collaborative Wellcome Trust bioimaging grant.

This work was led by first author Dr Will Smith, who completed his PhD as part of the MRC DTP.

The work presents a new fluorescent protein named StayRose, which is the first red version of the photobleaching-resistant green protein StayGold. These photostable proteins can be tagged to proteins of interest for microscopy and overcome the previous issue of fluorescence loss during prolonged imaging. StayRose contains an unnatural amino acid, 3-aminotyrosine, which underpins its red colour. Tests showed that StayRose maintains the extreme photostability of StayGold. The work presents a StayRose crystal structure, the first of a 3-aminotyrosine-incorporating fluorescent protein, and demonstrates use of StayRose in bacteria and zebrafish embryos.

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A recent publication in Advanced Healthcare Materials led by PhD student Sophie Hill is the result of a collaboration between Sébastien Perrier and Robert Dallmann. Together they show the potential of cyclic peptide-polymer conjugate nanotubes as powerful drug delivery vectors in a mammalian model of human disease.

The Perrier lab has already shown that these nanotubes are great drug delivery tools due to their propensity for dynamic self-assembly, high aspect ratio morphology and structural interchangeability, and demonstrated the shielding abilities of the polymeric corona of nanotubes to enhance pro-drug bond stabilities and modulate hydrolysis.

Here, they have used a hydrophobic core with multiple drug units attached to improve drug loading capacity and overall efficiency of the nanotube carriers. They show in vitro efficacy and in vivo pharmacokinetic and anti-tumour pharmacodynamics of these nanotubes in colorectal cancer models, comparing the potent topoisomerase inhibitor SN-38 with its clinically-used parent pro-drug irinotecan.

This work highlights the potential of SN-38 nanotubes as well-tolerated therapeutic option for colorectal cancer, with implications for future clinical translation and improved patient outcomes.

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For the first time, the OHCAO team at University of Warwick have published national data for children who suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, underscoring urgent need for CPR training.

Warwick Medical School research has explored how women experience menopause and access care within the NHS, focusing on inequalities shaped by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural norms.

Professor Swaran Singh has been named in Health Service Journal’s (HSJ) list of the top 50 most influential Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in English health and care.

Congratulations to our researchers Joanne Muter and Chow Seng Kong on receiving funding through UKRI's new Proof of Concept programme to develop the digital Endometrium Function Test.

University of Warwick researchers have secured a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Intelligent Imaging Innovations (3i) to roll out a new AI-guided microscopy platform.