Departmental news

Our new Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB) has been awarded the West Midlands Building of the Year award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Press Release (10 May 2024)

In a collaboration between Soochow (China), Institut Pasteur (Shanghai), CDC (China), Liverpool, Georgia (US), and Warwick we investigated the host-specificity of S. enterica based on 362,931 publically accessible genomes in EnteroBase (a database of sequenced enteric bacteria genomes hosted and developed at Warwick). We detected the presence of nine populations that are enriched in pigs and observed frequent intercontinental transmission of genetically almost identical strains in these pig-enriched populations, which cannot be explained solely by natural causes. Therefore, we focused on one population enriched in pigs, serovar Choleraesuis, reconstructing the historical fluctuations in this population, accumulation of antimicrobial-resistant genes, and international transmissions. We revealed a 2-stage expansion in the population of this serovar, the first associated with the development of intensive pig farming in the early 20th century and the second due to the increased frequency of antimicrobial resistance after the 1960s. Additionally, we found that Europe and the USA contributed the most to international transmissions of this serovar.
Read the paper hereLink opens in a new window.
Read the press release here.Link opens in a new window

Led by Professor Robin Allaby, a new expedition is set to delve into Europe’s pivotal Mesolithic Stone Age site, Bouldnor Cliff. The expedition is a race against time to the submerged prehistoric settlement as erosion threatens its complete loss.

Press Release (26 April 2024).

Dr James Blake was invited to speak on behalf of the Department's Centre for Space Domain Awareness at the 19th Space Situational Awareness Conference in London.

Last week, a group of students and staff from the Department of Economics participated in a sensory awareness workshop to gain insights into what it feels like to have a disability.

Dr Juliana Carneiro, the Department’s Disability Coordinator and organiser of the workshop, gave an introduction about the importance of awareness of sensory perception and neurodiversity in our learning and working communities. She said:

“Being aware of how disabled people experience the world gives us a valuable insight into issues related to diversity within our society; it teaches us empathy, encourages inclusivity and helps us build a supportive environment for all members of our community. It is also a soft skill recognised and highly valued by employers in the job market.”

Several speakers were invited to contribute to the topic or tell their story of sensory perception, including:

• Dr Damien Homer, Head of Disability Services who talked about different types of assistance available to Warwick’s students.
• Diana Shore, Assistant Professor, WMG - shared her own experience as a person with a disability which is not always visible to those around her. Diana invited the audience to participate in a role play: Juliana interviewed Diana while fidgeting and making noises, to show the audience the challenges a person with hearing impairment must overcome.
• Nivaria Morales Salas, IT Developer in the Department of Economics, explained in her talk about different categories of visual impairment and shared her own experience as a person with disability.
• Martyn Parker, Community Engagement Officer for Warwickshire Vision came with his guide dog Harper who stole the limelight! Martyn shared his experience of visual impairment and interacted with students walking them through obstacles while they were wearing an eye band.

The participants engaged with a number of other hands-on activities to have a taste of the diversity of sensory perception experienced by people within our community, including the use of a wheelchair.

Nivaria Morales Salas commented about the event:

“It’s great to see events like this being organised on campus. They raise awareness of the reality of living with a disability as well as showing that disabled people make a positive contribution to society despite facing daily challenges.”

Economics student
Kush Majithia
trying one of
the activities

More than 20 students and 6 members of staff benefitted from attending the event, fully engaging in the activities and role play and raising their knowledge and understanding of studying, working, and living with diverse people.

Dr Carneiro wishes to thank her colleagues who supported her in organising the event: Claire Johnson, Student Engagement and Experience Coordinator and Tina MacSkimming, Student Support and Progression Officer from the Department of Economics.

Dr Carneiro is also grateful to the sponsors of the event - Professor Rebecca Freeman, Director of the Dean of Student Office, and Professor Lorenzo Frigerio, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education) - for their support of the Department's Inclusive Education Action Plan.

Related content

Wellbeing and Student Support at Warwick:

• Information for Disabled Students 
• Staff and Student Wellbeing guidelines
• Self-help Resources

Professor Reinhard MaurerLink opens in a new window has recently published his paper in Physical Review Letters titledStructure of graphene grown on Cu(111): X-ray Standing Wave Measurement and Density Functional Theory Prediction'Link opens in a new window

Fan Wang, a 4th year PhD student, has awarded a Hannan Graduate Student Travel Award by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is the only UK-based recipient this year.

Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the top three global venues for machine learning research, which will be held on 21-27 July 2024 in Vienna, Austria:

• Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPs, by Stelios Triantafyllou, Aleksa Sukovic, Debmalya Mandal, and Goran Radanovic
• Dynamic Facility Location in High Dimensional Euclidean Spaces, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Gramoz Goranci, Shaofeng Jiang, Yi Qian, and Yubo Zhang (Accepted as a spotlight, among the top 13 percent of all accepted papers)
• High-Dimensional Kernel Methods under Covariate Shift: Data-Dependent Implicit Regularization, by Yihang Chen, Fanghui Liu, Taiji Suzuki, and Volkan Cevher
• Revisiting character-level adversarial attacks, by Elias Abad Rocamora, Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Reward Model Learning vs. Direct Policy Optimization: A Comparative Analysis of Learning from Human Preferences, by Andi Nika, Debmalya Mandal, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Georgios Tzannetos, Goran Radanovic, and Adish Singla
• To Each (Textual Sequence) Its Own: Improving Memorized-Data Unlearning in Large Language Models, by George-Octavian Bărbulescu and Peter Triantafillou
• Towards Neural Architecture Search through Hierarchical Generative Modeling, by Lichuan Xiang, Łukasz Dudziak, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Abhinav Mehrotra, Nicholas Lane, and Hongkai Wen

Science fiction meets science fact at the Royal Institution on May 4th, as Dr Alex Baker discusses the captivating inspiration real-world reactions have had on the Star Wars universe. bit.ly/4a4oyiw