Departmental news

Our thoughts are with staff and students affected by the devastating earthquake that has hit Turkey and Syria. People have asked about how they can respond to this; various charitable organisations are coordinating humanitarian efforts that you can contribute to e.g. The Red Cross

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you need support, or if you have any concerns about someone else.  Students can contact the Wellbeing & Student Support Services team via the wellbeing portal or by calling 024 7657 5570, access bereavement support from the Chaplaincy, or speak to their personal tutor.  Staff can access support through the Staff Wellbeing Hub, by contacting the Employee Assistance Programme, or accessing bereavement support from the Chaplaincy.  

Chelsea Brown, a PhD student with Professor Phill Stansfeld and Dr Liz Fullam, has published a first author paper on tackling Tuberculosis (TB) by modelling mycobacterial membranes.

TB rivals covid-19 as the biggest infectious disease killer of humans, claiming millions of lives each year. Now, ground-breaking research from the Universities of Warwick and Toulouse has identified a new method to help tackle this global issue.
Press Release (30 January 2023)

Professor John Walsh talks about his research into how viruses interact with agricultural crop plants, and how to improve vegetable crops’ resistance to viruses without using pesticides.

His food and agricultural research has helped to improve natural resistance to the viruses that infect plants, reduce the use of pesticides and improve health and welfare.

The Law School's Professor Sam Adelman discusses the historic and contemporary injustices caused by maldevelopment and neoliberal globalisation, climate change and ecological destruction in a recent interview with Faculti, an online reference tool which gives instant access to relevant and up-to-date academic and professional research insights. Watch the full interview.

Fireside Tales of Terror: the Gothic and Winter took place on 15-16 December 2022. The conference was sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre, the ELCS department, and the International Gothic Association. As well as a large number of online audience members who weren’t participating, there were 33 presenting delegates with papers ranging from Romantic period epics, to Victorian short stories, through to video games and film, to fashion and vintage postcards. The two keynote speakers were Dr Derek Johnston (Queen’s University, Belfast) on his work on televisual period drama at Christmas and the Gothic mode, and Dr Monica Germana (University of Westminster) on Boreal Gothic, folklore and travel in winter.  

Our objectives were to bring scholars from around the world together to explore the environmental and affective traditions and departures between the Gothic mode and the winter season across different mediums in the arts and humanities. The conference itself was extremely successful in terms of exploring these topics, and forging new networks and the connections across papers, as well as new and innovative research being showcased. 

Elizabeth who works in the Ultrasound Group presented an update of her results to the NDA and the wider nuclear industry, showing how the pressure inside a welded steel container could be measured using non-contact acoustic transducers to excite and detect the natural resonant modes of the container via the electromagnetic Lorentz mechanism. The pressure inside the containers can increase due to radioactive decays and chemical reactions of the material inside the sealed containers, and it is important to be able to measure if the pressure becomes too high. Using a combination of Finite Element (FE) modelling, optical vibrometer and EMAT measurements, Elizabeth has proved that the resonant modes that she is experimentally measuring, correspond exactly to those predicted by the FE models, and that generally the frequency of those modes increase as pressure inside the container increases. Elizabeth plans to develop a prototype system for trials in the nuclear industry, under an EPSRC IAA project that she will start later this year.

Watch a video presentation of Elizabeth's work.

The Department of Sociology received a Silver Athena SWAN Award from Advance HE in recognition of its intersectional efforts to advance gender equality. The submission for this award can be viewed here.

Our Emeritus Professor David WhitehouseLink opens in a new window who, through his internationally recognised work, promoting women has been promoting the name of University of Warwick, has recently won a ‘Wow’ AwardLink opens in a new window – the first of three such awards given to him by the Vice-Chancellor, Stuart Croft, in December 2022.

School kids get a taste of something a bit different to the conventional concept of Chemistry