Departmental news
Former Law Student Bience Gawanas is awarded Honorary Degree at 2023 Graduation Ceremony
The University of Warwick recently announced new honorary graduates as part of the summer 2023 graduation ceremonies. At today’s ceremony (Friday 21st July) former Law student Bience Gawanas will be awarded one of these honorary degrees in recognition of her outstanding contributions and achievements.
5 papers accepted to FOCS 2023
Five papers from the Theory and Foundations (FoCS) Research Group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP) have been accepted to the 64th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2023), the IEEE flagship conference in theoretical computer science that will be held on November 6 - 9, 2023 in Santa Cruz, California, USA:
- "Chasing positive bodies" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Niv Buchbinder, Roie Levin, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "Dynamic (1+epsilon)-approximate matching size in truly sublinear update time" by Sayan Bhattacharya, Peter Kiss, and Thatchaphol Saranurak.
- "Polynomial-time pseudodeterministic construction of primes" by Lijie Chen, Zhenjian Lu, Igor C. Oliveira, Hanlin Ren, and Rahul Santhanam.
- "Approximating edit distance in the fully dynamic model" by Tomasz Kociumaka, Anish Mukherjee, and Barna Saha.
- "Traversing combinatorial 0/1-polytopes via optimization" by Arturo Merino and Torsten Mütze.
Professor David Greenwood on UK Gigafactory announcement from TATA Sons/JLR
Reactive statement from Professor David Greenwood, CEO of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and Director of Industrial Engagement at WMG at the University of Warwick
“This is fantastic news and secures the future of our UK auto industry which would otherwise have been lost by 2035. Furthermore, this secures the supply chain meaning we’ve kept those jobs for everyone across the country.
“This announcement means that the UK is now above “critical mass” for supply chain companies and therefore sets the UK up to be an attractive place for businesses in the supply chain to invest to supply upstream and downstream materials needed for electric vehicle production. As one of the UK’s biggest academic institutions working in the area of battery and electric vehicle innovation, this is great news for all 250 of our researchers – we will now see the results of our work used in UK based industries and benefiting UK taxpayers rather than being exploited by competitors abroad.
“This is the culmination six years work here at Warwick Manufacturing Group - we helped the UK government set up the Faraday Battery Challenge which was a key part of the then Government’s industrial strategy. That investment has now borne fruit. Clearly, we now need to define our future vision and strategy as the global industrial landscape evolves at breakneck speed.
“This means the Prime Minister has realised he must provide sufficient investment to ensure the country is a competitive runner in the global race to dominate the markets created by the massive green transition needed to avert climate catastrophe.”
Battery recycling
Researchers at the University of Warwick estimate that by 2040 339,000 tonnes of batteries are expected to reach the end of their life in the UK alone.
Prof David Greenwood adds: “While we are busy building all these electric cars, we also need to think about what happens at the end of their useful life. Batteries contain significant quantities of materials which are costly to extract and refine and which could be hazardous to the environment if improperly disposed of. Investment is needed to create suitable recycling facilities in the UK within the next few years, and beyond that further research is needed to allow economic recovery of much greater proportions of the battery material. In doing so we will protect the environment, secure valuable raw materials, and reduce the cost of transport.”
Gigafactory FAQs
What is a gigafactory?
A gigafactory is a large factory that produces large numbers of batteries for electric vehicles. Tesla has pioneered the concept in the US, with six factories so far to produce batteries for their cars.
Why do we need one?
In order to a compete internationally and help preserve the UK automotive industry battery production needs to be scaled up rapidly across both the UK and Europe. This situation is exacerbated by tariffs due to be imposed across the UK and EU unless a certain proportion of a car is produced in one of those jurisdictions.
As an EV battery makes up around half of a vehicle’s weight it is crucial the UK vastly scales up battery production. Gigafactories are the most efficient way to do this.
How are electric car batteries made?
EV batteries come in lots of different shapes and sizes but are all made up of many battery cells put together to form a battery pack.
To make a battery, we take electrochemically active materials, like graphite, nickel manganese, cobalt and lithium, and make powders from them. These powders are mixed with solvents and adhesives, then coated onto metal (aluminium or copper) foils which are then packaged together inside cells.
This is a very precise process – otherwise the quality of the battery is impacted. At WMG, around 20 battery cells per day can be produced. At a gigafactory, production would be closer to 20 cells per second.
How are batteries recycled?
To recycle batteries, fire is used to recover most of the metals. Water can then be used to get further metals that can’t be reached using heat alone. There are still difficulties however in recycling lithium or graphite, which make up a large percentage of the metals in the batteries themselves.
With 11 million tonnes of lithium-ion batteries expected to need recycling by 2030, the need to build domestic capacity to recycle them is greater than ever.
WLS Alumna gets HBO TV deal for adaptation of her debut novel
Yomi Adegoke, who studied on our 3 year LLB degree and graduated in 2014 will have her debut novel ‘Slay In Your Lane’ adapted into new TV programme ‘The List’ with HBO Max, BBC and A24 as partners. Yomi is a British journalist who writes about the intersection of race, feminism and popular culture.
Image credit: deadline.com
Professor Stephen Royle is elected as the new Deputy Chair of the Board of Directors of the Company of Biologists
Showcasing Biomedical Engineering Expertise
On Friday 7th July, researchers, clinical representatives and industrial partners gathered to share information on the latest Biomedical Engineering research.
Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Thesis Award
Congratulations to Dr Matthew Pearce who has been awarded the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine Thesis Award. Matthew was awarded this for his thesis titled “Applied-magnetic-field studies of f-electron materials."
Matthew did his undergraduate degree at Warwick, before continuing to do his PhD in the Superconductivity and Magnetism Group under the supervision of Paul Goddard. During his PhD he used a variety of experimental techniques including magnetometry (torque, SQUID, VSM and pulsed-field compensated coil), electrical transport (traditional 4-wire and PDO), heat capacity and x-ray scattering. Matthew performed measurements at low temperatures and high magnetic fields, utilising both the in-house facilities in the laboratories at Warwick, as well as international high-field user facilities – where materials can be studied in some of the highest magnetic fields on earth.
Matthew's research focussed in part on Ho2Ir2O7, which belongs to a class of highly frustrated magnetic systems known as spin-ices, which are famous for hosting magnetic monopole quasiparticles. Matthew and his collaborators found that not only do measurements of the electrical resistance in these systems act as an indicator for the density of magnetic monopoles, but also that, mediated by the monopoles on the Ho sublattice, an applied magnetic field is able to manipulate the antiferromagnetic Ir domains, with potential applications to areas such as spintronics. He also studied the compound CeOs4Sb12, which had previously been found to undergo a valence transition. This is a transition where f electrons undergo a transformation from quasi-localised to itinerant with perhaps the most dramatic example being that of elemental Ce, which is accompanied by a volume collapse often quoted to be as large as 15 %. Matthew and his collaborators mapped out the phase boundary of this transition which exhibited an extremely unusual shape, owing to the influence of locally varying strain within the sample and quantum fluctuations.
Since completing his PhD he has been working at the University of Oxford with Radu Coldea studying quantum magnetism.
Leonardo Melosi awarded prestigious European Central Bank fellowship
Professor Leonardo Melosi has been named as a ‘Wim Duisenberg’ fellow for 2024 by the European Central Bank (ECB).
The prestigious fellowship programme is named after the first President of the ECB and aims to promote policy-relevant research that meets the highest academic standards.
The programme offers research staff at the ECB the opportunity to gain exposure to the most recent advances in economic research, while giving prominent scholars the opportunity to gain insight into the policy-making environment of the ECB.
Professor Melosi will spend three months conducting research at the ECB in Summer 2024.
Leonardo Melosi is Professor of Economics at Warwick and previously served as Executive Director of the Center for Applied Macroeconomic Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. View his staff profile
Dr Serena Natile awarded prestigious ISRF Fellowship
Dr Serena Natile, Associate Professor at Warwick Law School, has been awarded the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) Early Career Fellowship for her project ‘Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution’.
Latest two academic promotions
We are happy to announce that Dr Gihan Mudalige and Dr Victor Sanchez have both been promoted to Professor from 1st August 2023.
Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!