News

The Faculty of SEM will be launching its annual Thesis and Post Doc prizes in January 2026 for the best thesis and research output of 2025 affiliated to the University of Warwick.

Last week's Charity Bake Off, organised by Emma Davis, raised £144.50 for Princess Alice Hospice and saw Yiping Zhang win Star Baker for her delicious Basque cheesecake. We’ll be in the atrium Thurs 27th at 12:30 for Biscuit Week…

Congratulations to Dr Ingrid Pelisoli who has been awarded the 2026 Royal Astronomical Society Fowler AwardLink opens in a new window for her noteworthy discoveries related to binary star systems and stellar mergers.

Read the full press release.

We are proud to share that our Chemistry technicians have been recognised with multiple Warwick Technician Commitment Awards for Outstanding Achievement this year, reflecting their exceptional contribution to the success of our department.

Plants mobilise their immune defences far earlier than scientists have believed for decades—and through a previously overlooked early signalling mechanism—according to a new study published in Nature Plants.

Professor Murray Grant and his team, including Emily Breeze and Erin Stroud have discovered a rapid, jasmonate-driven, early immune response in plants. A breakthrough live-imaging tool has allowed them to visualise immune signals moving out of infected leaves and across into uninfected leaves in real time.

(Image shows Temporal spatial dynamics of luciferase activity in JISS1:LUC plants following DCavrRpm1 challenge, initiating at 3 hpi. 3.20 hpi, 3.50 hpi and 4.30 hpi images capture the systemic spread of the signal over time. Credit: Gaikwad, T., Breen, S., Breeze, E., Stroud, E. et al. Nature Plants (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-025-02178-4)

Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Research Prizes 2026 – Nominations Now Open

We are pleased to announce that nominations are now open for two awards celebrating research excellence across the Faculty:

Professor Siddartha Khastgir, Head of Safe Autonomy at WMG, University of Warwick, said, "We are glad to see the UK Government is taking a bold step to improve the safety of the roads by publishing this national road safety strategy.

Huge congratulations to Dr Bryn Davies, who has received a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, “Unlocking a New Generation of Imperfection-Resilient Metamaterials.”

Previous winners of this in the department include Peter Topping, Martin Hairer, and Tom Montenegro-Johnson.

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.

The Archives of Disease in Childhood (ADC), the leading publication in Child Health in the UK by the British Medical Association celebrates the 100^th Anniversary. As of 2025, ADC has published over 38000 documents. Celebrating this anniversary - they have looked back at the most influential papers over the decades by pointing out the most cited articles of the main ADC edition in every decade. First century: Most cited papers in Archives of Disease in Childhood | Archives of Disease in Childhood

Dieter Wolke is pleased that the ADC paper, co-authored with then postdoc Dr Tanya Lereya was the most cited in the 2010s. The paper focussed on the long term effects of bullying and the implications for public health. Doctors need to ask about bullying and consider it in their practice!

The full citation is: Long-term effects of bullying | Archives of Disease in Childhood. the paper is open access!

Furthermore, another research paper with Dieter's collaborators then in Basel made it in the top 5 most cited by ADC in the 2010s: Associations between problems with crying, sleeping and/or feeding in infancy and long-term behavioural outcomes in childhood: a meta-analysis | Archives of Disease in Childhood. Since completing his PhD thesis Dieter has been researching and lecturing on the long term effects of crying, feeding and sleeping problems in infancy and toddlerhood and their treatment.