Departmental news

Our MB ChB students are hoping to make a real difference in the community by opening a Dementia Café in a popular residential area of Leamington.

Memory Lane café will take place on Wednesdays from 1pm – 3pm at the Sydni Centre from Wednesday 22 March, providing a friendly space for older people with memory loss, to chat, undertake a range of activities and have some refreshments. For more information click here

To celebrate International Women’s Day last week, LLM student Chidinma Kalu, initiated a fundraising activity to raise funds that will be utilised to empower women in Nigeria through equipping them with digital training and skills. The £364.12 raised will be used by the GirlLEAD Project to train and equip about 5 girls in Nigeria with digital skills, thus bridging the digital gender divide in the access to digital skills.

Expert comment from Mark Urbanowski.

Mark Urbanowski, Principal Engineer at WMG at the University of Warwick, said: “Travelling around the UK’s towns and cities is getting increasingly congested, polluted and unsafe. A key part of the solution to this problem, along with helping reach the UK’s Net Zero goal, is getting people and goods moved in efficient and clean vehicles, correctly sized for the journey, passenger and job requirements.

“Active travel, walking and cycling, as well as emerging micromobility transport options like e-bikes, e-cargo vehicles and e-scooters, need the right infrastructure to make them convenient and safe to use. Without investment for infrastructure and integration into the broader public transport system, modal shift to these vehicle types; by commuters, families and businesses; will languish behind the rest of Europe. It’s an issue we will be addressing at our Micromobility event in May.”

Congratulations to Professor Andrew McAinsh, Pro Dean for Research at WMS, who has just been awarded a Wellcome Discovery Award and Research Grant of over £2.5M. The research programme ‘Kinetochore self-correction mechanisms underlying faithful chromosome segregation in humans’ will run for eight years. Read the full news item here.

Memories of a founding member of the History Department William Dusinberre.

The Department congratulates recent PhD graduate Ozge Demirci, who has won the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award for her research in the economics of digitisation.

 Ozge Demirci has been awarded the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate AwardLink opens in a new window in the area of the economics of digitisation by the CESifo Research Network. The award is intended for promising young economists and is granted for the best paper presented at the CESifo Area Conferences. An award committee gives the award to a young economist on the basis of the scientific originality, policy relevance, and quality of exposition in their research. 

Ozge's research is in applied microeconomics with a focus on the economics of digitisation and discrimination. Some of her recent research investigates the impacts of regulations targeting algorithmic bias. She analyzes if anti-discriminatory policies that ban using sensitive information such as race or gender in algorithmic processes are effective or whether algorithms adjust to circumvent the regulations.

In her award-winning paper "Can Gender-Blind Algorithmic Pricing Eliminate the Gender Gap?" Dr Demirci uses a natural experiment to investigate the impact of gender-blind algorithmic pricing on consumers and firms. She focuses on a recent policy regulation that prohibits using gender information in pricing algorithms for automobile insurance in the US. Her research investigates how this policy affects the insurance premiums paid by male and female consumers and the pricing algorithms companies use. 

Ozge's findings show that after the policy was implemented, algorithms started to price features correlated with the riskiest gender group, young males, significantly more. For instance, drivers using specific car models associated with young males started paying more after the ban.

Dr Demirci's findings illustrate the limitations of anti-discrimination policies that impose group-blind pricing and have implications for the design of fairer regulations for algorithms.

Dr Demirci's winning paper will appear in the CESifo Working Paper SeriesLink opens in a new window.

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Ozge Demirci is a PhD graduate in Economics at the University of Warwick. She has received several awards during her graduate studies, including Outstanding Paper Award at Discrimination and Diversity Workshop and the Emerging Scholar Award from the Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations Research Network. Additionally, her research has received several grants, including a research grant from the Royal Economics Society and the Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Warwick.

Find more about Ozge's researchLink opens in a new window

As the UK reels from recent fruit and vegetable shortages, scientists are advising how to increase homegrown produce – benefitting the economy and the environment.

Press release (9 March 2023)

Once again, we proudly report on the publication of 14 student papers on the Warwick Monash Economics Student Papers (WM-ESP) portal which contains some of the most exciting undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations of Economics students from Warwick and Monash.

This is the fourth round of student papers published on the WM-ESP portal, launched in September 2021, showcasing now 56 dissertations which have been carefully selected based on their academic quality and originality. They cover a wide range of topics from all areas of economics, and focusing on some of the most pressing global issues that young economists are trying to understand and solve: inequality, poverty, the pandemic, climate emergency, obesity and healthcare, and many others.

We congratulate all the students selected and wish them every success in their future careers.

Below we feature six Warwick MSc graduates and their research papers:

STEM for Britain is a major scientific poster competition and exhibition with an aim to give members of both Houses of Parliament an insight into the outstanding research work being undertaken in UK universities by early career researchers and was held at the House of Commons on Monday 6th March, 2023. Dr Lauren DoyleLink opens in a new window was selected as a finalist within the Physics category, to represent her research on stellar flares from solar-type and low mass stars where she found these events don’t correlate with starspots like they do on the Sun. Overall, this suggests other stars have much more complex surfaces compared to the Sun which posses questions when thinking about the habitability of other planets. The event was attended by people from across the UK with representation from many institutions and organisations including The Institute of Physics and Warwick. During the event, Lauren got the opportunity to chat to lots of researchers across Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry about their research, with lots of interest from the judges about her own research. Although Lauren didn't place in the competition she told us:

"Despite this, I am really glad I went as it was an amazing experience where I was one of 20 finalists selected to represent Physics research in the UK. I was extremely proud to represent the Physics department at Warwick University and hope that others from the department will apply to attend next year."

Congratulations to Lauren for representing the department and her research at the event.

Find out more about STEM for Britain.Link opens in a new window