Gavin Bell, together with Cellist Nick Roberts from Warwick’s Coull Quartet and departmental colleagues Edwards, Harrison, Pounds and Roemer, has been awarded an IATL fellowship to “develop interdisciplinary teaching material around the links between science, mathematics and music“. The aim is to engage with students and academics across different faculties and to plan interdisciplinary undergraduate teaching in the area of science/maths/music. The fellowship builds on last year’s joint premiere of Edward Cowie’s Quintet for 21st Century Oboe and Quartet “The Colours of Dark Light”, a work directly inspired by physics. Congratulations to all involved in the fellowship!

Caroline Shenton Taylor who was a physics undergraduate has won the UK final of the Fame Lab competition and now will be involved in the international final at the Times Cheltenham science festival. Caroline was one of our undergraduates and did her PhD on Compton scattering under Jon Duffy.

A couple of 3rd year students were good ambassadors for the physics department as they won the recent nPower Energy Challenge competition...

It is with great sadness that the University and its Department of Physics reports the death of undergraduate student Yin Fei (Andrew) Chan, a 1^st year MPhys student who died on Thursday 9 January 2014.

Simon Pocock and Mohammad Che Rozenan were amongst the 2012-2013 recipients of the Giving to Warwick Prizes, for the Excellent 2nd Year Academic Performance category. Giving to Warwick Prizes are available thanks to the generous donations from Warwick's alumni and friends.

Congratulations to Max Grell, Chris Lamb, Joseph Pickering and William Hart, members of ‘Team Chivalry’ who represented Warwick University at the 2013 Npower Energy Challenge at the Royal Institution in London on March 18^th. The students applied for the competition by submitting a detailed response to the question ‘How can energy providers engage with customers more positively?’ and then delivered presentations at the quarter final, semi- final and final stages.

For Team Chivalry’s presentation in the final they described a ‘social reward scheme structure’ they had developed based on ‘gamification’ – this would encourage Npower customers to manage their energy use to reduce their bills and to develop social groups to gain rewards by developing community links, parents, for example, could use points they had accrued to buy resources for their local school.

Team Chivalry’s presentation received excellent feedback from the NPower executives on the judging panel for its innovative approach and the quality of their pitch and Max, Chris, Joseph and William were all outstanding ambassadors for their Department and the University. As a result of their achievements all of the students have been offered places on Npower’s Internship programme.