The grant, EP/K031066/1 "Inside-out: Statistical methods for Computed Tomography validation of complex structures in Additive Layer Manufacturing" is held together with WMG colleagues Mark Williams and Greg Gibbons as well as three industrial partners. It will fund a PDRA in Statistics for three years, and has value £498109. It concerns Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM, or "3-d printing"), which develops products directly from their digital design data by the layer-wise addition of material. Our ambition is to develop effective process control based on Computed Tomography data.

http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/K031066/1

The Department of Statistics this week welcomes Dr Simon Spencer as a full member of academic staff. Simon worked at the University of Nottingham and at Massey University in New Zealand before coming to Warwick as a postdoc in Complexity Science. His new position is an important one for the Department, at the interface between Statistics and the Warwick Centre for Analytical Sciences, an EPSRC-funded "Science and Innovation" initiative.

A direct upshot of the 2008 CRiSM workshop on composite likelihood methods is a special issue of the major international journal Statistica Sinica, with 14 new peer-reviewed papers on this topic.  The special issue was edited by N Reid (U Toronto), B Lindsay (Penn State U) and K-Y Liang (Johns Hopkins U), and can be found online at

http://www3.stat.sinica.edu.tw/statistica/j21n1/21-1.html

The registration period for departments making a commitment to use and/or support the PhD-training initiative APTS in 2010-11 has just closed, and the number of APTS Member Institutions has risen again, to 26 (last year it was 24).  Fifteen of those departments will form the first cohort of APTS Underwriting Institutions, having each made a financial commitment that will help APTS to secure facilities at APTS-week hosting universities well in advance.

View the full lists here