Departmental news

Congratulations to Joe Creegen who received The Ogden Trust award for exceptional contribution to Physics outreach highlighting his dedication and ongoing support of the department's outreach work.

 A collaboration of physicists (led by Dr Marina Lafarga Magro and Yoshi Eschen) marked a milestone by holding the first ever Orbyts conferenceLink opens in a new window at the University of Warwick on 20^th of June this year.

In June, a team of enthusiastic physicists attended the annual Big Bang Fair at Birmingham's NEC, aiming to spark young students interest in science and future careers in the field.

The Big Bang Fair is the UK's biggest celebration of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) for schools and runs for three days each year, with thousands of year 6, 7 and 8 students in attendance. The team from the Department of Physics were also joined by colleagues from the Department of Engineering, Department of Chemistry and Warwick Manufacturing Group from the University of Warwick.

Watch the video of the team at The Big Bang Fair.

Earlier this July, we proudly hosted our annual Scientist Experience trip funded by the X-Ray Material Science Beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF)Link opens in a new window in Grenoble.

The trip offers sixteen female Year 12 Physics students from across the UK a once in a lifetime, all-expenses paid opportunity to visit the prestigious European Synchrotron Radiation Facility.

The discovery was first published online in Nature Astronomy in April, by then PhD student, and now postdoc, James Munday and has since been featured on the cover of Nature Astronomy’s June issue. James, supervised by Dr Ingrid Pelisoli and Prof Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, discovered a type Ia supernova progenitor within a mere 50 parsecs. Type Ia supernovae are standardisable candles used to measure cosmological distances and were instrumental in the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe (Nobel Prize in Physics 2011).

The 75th UK Diamond Research Conference was held at the University of Warwick from 7th to 10th July 2025, bringing together over 120 delegates from academia and industry to explore the latest advancements in diamond science and technology.

On Saturday 5^th July, the department celebrated it’s 60^th birthday celebration with a vibrant day of reflection as one of the University’s founding departments, and looked towards a bright future for Physics at Warwick as we continue to work to make a better world together.

Congratulations to Sihui Zhong who has been awarded the Royal Astronomical Society Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize 2024 for her PhD thesis titled “Decayless Kink Oscillations of Solar Coronal Loops”, completed at CFSA under the supervision of Professor Valery Nakariakov.

The Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize is awarded to the best doctoral thesis in geophysics on an annual basis.

The Warwick Awards for Public and Community Engagement (WAPCE) recognise and celebrate the roles of Warwick staff and students connecting with the public—locally, nationally, and globally.

A new paper has been published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Energy & Environmental Science by postdoc Yi Yuan, which has been selected as a ‘Research Highlight’ by Nature Energy due to its importance in the field.