Launching this week for the summer of 2020; an exciting new 8 week long research internship program, run by the Department of Statistics. Projects across the fields of Statistics, Probability and AI aimed at giving successful applicants an ideal introduction to a career in research.

Candidates will be guided by an academic supervisor and they will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly cohort events. More information, including details of how to apply, can be found at http://warwick.ac.uk/stats-interns. DEADLINE for applications is 28 February, 2020.

On 10 December the European Research Council (ERC) announced the recipients of its latest Consolidator Grant competition: 301 top scientists and scholars across Europe. Funding for these researchers, part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is worth in total €600 million. With this support, the new grantees will have a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact.

Dr Mika Vesterinen from the Elementary Particle Physics group has been awarded over €1.8 million for a project to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical forces of nature, using one of the particle detectors at the CERN facility. He said: “The Standard Model makes several precise predictions that are yet to be matched by experimental measurements of the same precision. The ERC funding allows me to build a team of experts that will confront this problem with innovative high-precision analyses of data from the LHCb experiment at CERN.

“A significant disagreement between our measurements and the predictions would indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is the holy grail of particle physics.”

The School of Life Sciences is proud to announce that it has been awarded another 5 years of Royal Society of Biology (RSB) advanced accreditation for its 4 year integrated Masters (MBio) degrees. Our new Neuroscience degree has gained interim accreditation which should be awarded full advanced accreditation upon graduation of the first cohort.

Advanced Degree Accreditation by the Society recognises academic excellence in the biosciences, and highlights degrees that educate the research and development leaders and innovators of the future. The Advanced Accreditation criteria require evidence that graduates from the programme meet defined sets of learning outcomes, including gaining a substantial period of research experience.

Graduates from these programmes will receive one year of free membership to the RSB at Associate level. They can also apply for membership of the RSB at member (MRSB) level after two years of practice rather than the usual three years, due to the significant research experience gained.

The RSB is the leading professional body for the biological sciences in the UK. It represents over 17,000 biologists from all areas of the life sciences, as well as over 100 organisations which make up the diverse landscape of biology in the UK and overseas. It offers members unique opportunities to engage with the life sciences and share their passion for biology.

Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship awarded to Dr Wei He.

As a result of the Cybersecurity Feasibility Studies competition WMG has been named as a partner in three key government-funded cybersecurity projects.

The Competition was launched in August 2019 and called for the automotive industry to submit their ideas on how to create a robust cybersecurity solution to support the mainstream rollout of CAVs across the UK and ensure a solution that both addresses and informs the expectations of significant emerging cybersecurity industry standards. It has been spearheaded by government-led entities including Zenzic, Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Department for Transport (DfT). Some £2million will now be invested in the seven separate projects.

WMG at the University of Warwick will be part of the project consortiums for ResiCAV, BearCAT and PNT Cyber Resilience.

ResiCAV

ResiCAV looks at how the mobility industry will detect, understand and respond to emerging cybersecurity threats in real-time.

The ResiCAV consortium will receive a grant to help CAVs develop real-time responsiveness to cybersecurity threats. The consortium will set out the requirements and specifications for Vehicle Security Operations Centres (VSOCs) that support the monitoring demands of the forthcoming ISO/SAE 21434, plus extend the application of artificial intelligence and data visualisation techniques. Finally, ResiCAV will deliver the requirements for a UK road transport Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence to support the UK’s position of meeting the global challenge of automotive cybersecurity head on.

Combining cross-sector expertise, it will be delivered by a consortium led by HORIBA MIRA, Thales and BT, with further support from WMG at the University of Warwick, the Centre for Modelling & Simulation (CFMS), Oxfordshire County Council, AESIN Techworks, plus the University of South Wales, the University of Bristol, Coventry University and the National Digital Exploitation Centre (NDEC).

Professor Carsten Maple said: "We are delighted to be the academic partner in the ResiCAV consortium. The project will make a real difference to ensuring the cyber resilience of connected and autonomous vehicles both in engineering and operation. We will bring our academic rigour to the project, helping to formalise the methodology, and developing the requirements and advancing the technology in machine learning to support monitoring of vehicles in operation."

BeARCAT

"BeARCAT brings together a strong consortium of WMG, Telefonica, Millbrook and the lead, Cisco. The project will investigate the feasibility of a coherent, holistic approach to cybersecurity testing for connected vehicle networks. Our main contribution to this work will be the development of a Security Assessment Framework for the testing of connected vehicles, taking advantage of our vast experience and knowledge acquired over a number of recent projects in the area," explains Professor Maple.

PNT Cyber Resilience

For PNT Cyber Resilience WMG researchers will be working alongside Spirent Communications investigating positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) products and services to demonstrate and determine the feasibility of a new observer-based technique to 'attack' and test CAV PNT-related functions in both controlled and real-world scenarios.

Find more information about WMG’s Intelligent Vehicles research here.

We are sorry to report that Professor Elmer Rees, from the first cohort of PhD students in Warwick, died on 4th October 2019.

Our 2020 winter graduation ceremony took place on 21 January, celebrating the fantastic achievements of our new Master's, PhD and Orthodontic Therapy alumni.

Each year, the Web of Science Group identifies the world’s most influential researchers. The select few who have been most frequently cited by their peers over the last decade. In 2019, fewer than 6,300, or 0.1%, of the world’s researchers, across 21 research fields, have earned this exclusive distinction.

Professor Dieter Wolke is among this elite group recognized for his exceptional research influence, demonstrated by the production of multiple highly-cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year (Cross-Field) in Web of Science.

Video: What it means to be a Highly Cited Researcher ➞