A paper co-authored by Matthias C. Caro has been featured on the cover of PRX Quantum. PRX Quantum is a premier journal for quantum information science and technology research. The work was a collaboration with Haimeng Zhao (Caltech & Tsinghua), Laura Lewis (Caltech & Google), Ishaan Kannan (Caltech), Yihui Quek (Harvard & MIT) and Hsin-Yuan Huang (Caltech, Google & MIT).

Characterizing a quantum system by learning its state or unitary evolution is a key tool in developing quantum devices, with applications in practical quantum machine learning, benchmarking, and error mitigation. However, in general, this task requires exponentially many resources. Prior knowledge is required to circumvent this exponential bottleneck. The paper pinpoints the complexity for learning states and unitaries that can be implemented by quantum circuits with a bounded number of gates, a broad setting that is topical for current quantum technologies. When measuring efficiency with respect to the number of accesses to the unknown quantum state or unitary, the paper presents and implements algorithms that are provably optimally efficient. Thereby, this work establishes the equivalence between the complexity of learning quantum states or unitaries and the complexity of creating them. However, it also shows that the data processing necessarily requires exponential computation time under reasonable cryptographic assumptions.

Ananya Singh, a third-year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Wing Ying Chow, was selected to present her research at the prestigious STEM for Britain event held at the House of Commons on March 11, 2025. Her research focuses on the 'Development of solid-state NMR approaches for probing fungal and human matrices with relevance to human disease.'

Epidemiologist Dr Matt Combes was recently interviewed for the Guardian about Ash die-back in the UK and the scientific efforts to protect ash trees. The publication highlights Matt's review article on ash die-back and his more recent work at Warwick modelling the severity of the disease and how this may interact with the emerald ash borer beetle. The modelling is part of the SMARTIES (Surveillance and Management of multiple Risks to Treescapes: Integrating Epidemiology and Stakeholder behaviour) project.
Read the Guardian article (20 December 2024).
Photograph: Andy Soloman/Alamy

Prof Adam Harper has been awarded a Frontiers of Science Award, which recognises the most outstanding research in the past 10 years.

The EDITH trial (‘Early Detection using Information Technology in Health’) is backed by £11 million of government support via the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). It is the latest example of how British scientists are transforming cancer care, building on the promising potential of cutting-edge innovations to tackle one of the UK’s biggest killers. Read the full news item here.

Interactions between infant characteristics and parenting factors rarely replicate across cohorts and developmental domains

Robert Eves, Finiki Nearchou, Dieter Wolke, Michael Pluess, Sakari Lemola

First published: 10 March 2025

https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14149

A new study led by Dr Robert Eves, Honorary Research Fellow and Prof. Dieter Wolke from Warwick and colleagues from the Universities of Bielefeld, Surrey and University College Dublin investigated how infant characteristics (temperament, birthweight) and parenting affect later developmental outcome such as IQ and mental health. Various developmental models have been put forward how infant characteristics and parenting may affect outcome ranging from various interactive models (diathesis-stress, differential susceptibility or vantage sensitive) or are they simply additive effects?

Our investigation utilising four cohort studies in four countries incorporating over 30.000 children and their parents found that a simple additive model of infant characteristics and parenting predicted most outcomes (10/16 analyses) followed by diathesis stress (4/16) and vantage sensitivity (2/16). No evidence for differential susceptibility was found.

To conclude, developmental outcomes are more consistently explained by additive effects rather than by interaction effects. Simple is beautiful!