The Department is welcoming our new Assistant Professor Dr. Tom Gur, who will be associated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP).

Before joining Warwick, Tom held a postdoctoral researcher position in the Theory Group at UC Berkeley (2017–2019). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the guidance of Oded Goldreich, in 2017.

PhD student Jeremias Knoblauch has just won a Facebook fellowship: https://research.fb.com/fellows/knoblauch-jeremias/ 
Details of the fellowship here: https://research.fb.com/programs/fellowship/

Jeremias is also a visiting Turing researcher in the DCE programme and his FB application was supported by Professor Mark Girolami and the DCE programme.

As a first step towards a new measurement of the W boson mass with the LHCb experiment the role of proton structure uncertainties is studied in detail, resulting in interesting new ideas.

The School of Life Sciences wants to express its continued support for all students who have been affected by the group chat case, directly or indirectly. We ask that any current student who requires support relating to this or any other incident talks to their Personal Tutor, Senior Tutor, Director of Wellbeing or any other member of staff in the School. Our doors are open.

We are committed to providing a community which is safe, respectful and inclusive to all our students and staff. We pledge to support all of our students, present and prospective, to ensure they have the best possible learning experience in an environment in which they feel safe to learn and work together.

We have expressed to senior management our concern about the way in which the group chat case has been handled and support the University's recent commitment to strengthened values and disciplinary procedures. More must be done to ensure that all students at the University feel safe, respected and included.

Ways to reduce social inequality in the West Midlands and boost productivity will be researched thanks to an £800,000 research project, led by Warwick Business School with WMG at the University of Warwick, and City-REDI at the University of Birmingham.

WMG and Warwick Business School from the University of Warwick and City-REDI at the University of Birmingham will examine the factors that constrain firm-level innovation and productivity across the region, with a particular focus on the role of skills shortages, the importance of supply chains and impacts of foreign direct investment.

They will also work in collaboration with regional stakeholders, including the West Midlands Combined Authority, the Midlands Engine, five Local Enterprise Partnerships and private sector firms including Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin. More widely, the project will connect with the CBI - building on their recent productivity work- the Chambers of Commerce, TUC and Unite.

As well as contributing to the local industrial strategy the research team will examine trade-offs between policies and practices which target improvements in productivity against other development goals.

In particular, understanding how productivity improvements and related policies can contribute to inclusive growth which reduces inequalities within and across regions, or heighten such inequalities is a central aim of the research.

Professor Nigel Driffield, the leader of the project from WBS, University of Warwick said:

“This is an exciting project that will look to feed into the region’s industrial strategy. The West Midlands is known as the manufacturing hub of the UK, but it needs to build on this reputation, attracting more investment and more jobs to the area, particularly with the threat of Brexit looming.

"This project has three stands: researching regional Differences, skills and inclusive growth, plus investigating investment decisions, foreign investment and trade; and finally evaluating analytics enabled supply chains and operational productivity.”

Professor Janet Godsell of WMG, University of Warwick comments:

“For over 25 years it has been recognised that supply chains compete and not individual companies, but the focus has remained on company productivity.

"This project provides an opportunity to create a step change in productivity, by working with end-to-end supply chains supporting the regions automotive and infrastructure sectors, to improve end-to-end supply chain productivity.”

Director of City-REDI and project lead for Birmingham, Professor Simon Collinson, said:

“I am very pleased to be working with our partners at Warwick University on a project that is so critical to the future economic well-being of the region. The UK lags behind other countries in terms of average productivity and the West Midlands lags behind the UK average.

"But we cannot focus on productivity in isolation of other challenges. By contributing to a reduction in social inequality, alongside promoting economic growth, we are continuing the legacy of the University of Birmingham as a long-standing anchor institution in the Birmingham city-region.”

Professor Anne Green from City-REDI said:

“The foci of the research at City-REDI on skills and inclusive growth issues is in line with key concerns with regional policy makers.”

HetSys is an entirely new EPSRC-supported Centre for Doctoral Training spread across 5 academic departments including Mathematics. It is recruiting enthusiastic students (first intake October 2019) from across the physical sciences who enjoy using their mathematical skills and thinking flexibly to solve complex problems. By developing these skills HetSys will train people to challenge current state-of-the-art in computational modelling of heterogeneous, ‘real world’ systems across a range of research themes such as nanoscale devices, new catalysts, superalloys, smart fluids, laser-plasma interactions, underpinned by research into the mathematical foundations of the associated computational models.
HetSys Homepage

University announcement for MathSys and HetSys

The enzyme that ‘loads up’ fat-carrying particles in the liver before they are transported around the body has been identified for the first time by scientists at Warwick Medical School.