News

Congratulations to Dr Soroush Abolfathi at Warwick’s School of Engineering who has been awarded one of the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prizes in Engineering.

We are happy to announce that Dr Kaihua Qin has joined the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. Before joining Warwick, he was a researcher at Yale University and completed his PhD at Imperial College London.

Kaihua’s research spans computer security with a particular focus on blockchain systems. His past work has revealed critical vulnerabilities in blockchains, such as MEV and imitation attacks, which affect multiple layers of the stack, from networking and consensus to applications. His current work aims to establish provable security for decentralized systems, drawing on techniques from program analysis, distributed computing, formal verification, applied cryptography, and game theory.

In addition, he is actively exploring the use of AI for security, leveraging recent advances in large language models to enhance vulnerability discovery, assessment, and mitigation across a variety of systems.

We welcome him to the department!

Shreya Sinha Roy, a fourth-year PhD student, has recently been announced as one of the 21 recipients of the IMS 2025 ICSDS Student Travel Award. Her research introduces 'prequential posteriors' as a likelihood-free approach for data assimilation. She will travel to Seville to present her work at ICSDS 2025 in December.

If you're interested in studying an MSc by research of PhD, you can explore our exciting range of postgraduate study opportunities, across our research groups which have been designed to tackle real-world problems, expand knowledge and contribute to global research.

Find out more about available projects and funding opportunities.

University of Warwick has received a transformational £10 million philanthropic gift from alumnus Tim Hartnoll to establish a pioneering new research centre dedicated to sustainable electrical chemistry research for new forms of batteries.

Prof Chris Corre, Prof Greg Challis and Dr. Lona Alkhalaf from the University of Warwick and Professor David Lupton rfrom Monash University have discovered a promising new antibiotic that shows activity against drug-resistant bacterial pathogens, including MRSA and VRE.

In a new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), researchers from the Monash Warwick Alliance Combatting Emerging Superbug Threats Initiative have discovered a promising new antibiotic - pre-methylenomycin C lactone. The new antibiotic was found ‘hiding in plain sight’ as an intermediate chemical in the natural process that produces the well-known antibiotic methylenomycin A. When tested for antimicrobial activity, one of the intermediates, pre-methylenomycin C lactone, was shown to be over 100 times more active against diverse Gram-positive bacteria than the original antibiotic methylenomycin A. Specifically, it was shown to be effective against S. aureus and E. faecium, the bacterial species behind Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) respectively.

Importantly, the researchers could not detect any emergence of resistance to pre-methylenomycin C lactone in Enterococcus bacteria under conditions where vancomycin resistance is observed. Vancomycin is a “last line” treatment for Enterococcus infection, so this finding is especially promising for VRE, a WHO High Priority Pathogen.

With its simple structure, potent activity, difficult to resist profile, and scalable synthesis, pre-methylenomycin C lactone represents a promising new candidate that could potentially help to save some of the 1.1 million people who are the victims of AMR every year.

WMG has launched a new undergraduate programme, BEng Robotics Engineering with Artificial Intelligence (AI), expanding its undergraduate education portfolio. The course has been developed in response to significant technological transformations across industry, driven by the increasing use of robotics and AI.

Congratulations to Professor James Sprittles, who has been awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship to lead a new programme on drop collisions and their collective behaviour, spanning scales from nanometres to kilometres.

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.

Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

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.