Departmental news

We have a small number of work experience placements available each year for students in Years 10-12. Our 2023 work experience will take place on Monday 3rd April to Thursday 6th April inclusive.

The work experience placement will provide you with a broad insight into physics and what it would be like to work in a busy university physics department. You will spend time with our highly skilled research and technical staff learning about real-life physics problems and working on exciting research projects.

Find out more and how to apply.Link opens in a new window

New researchLink opens in a new window led by the Department of Economics has shed light on how eating and exercise habits changed during lock-down – or, in fact, how they changed a lot less than people believe.

Professor Thijs van RensLink opens in a new window and colleagues surveyed just over 1000 West Midlands residents in May 2020, several weeks into the UK’s strict lockdown when activities outside the home were severely restricted, and again in September 2020 when the rules had been relaxed.

Analysis of the resultsLink opens in a new window showed that for most people, lockdown made very little difference to the number of portions of fruit and vegetables they ate. However, one group bucked the trend – women who, pre-lockdown, commuted for more than 30 minutes to work. This group was the only one to significantly increase the proportion of fruit and vegetables in their diet – West Midlands men who saved significant time commuting did not change their diets.

Commenting on the findings Professor van Rens said:

“There has been widespread speculation that diets became less healthy during lockdown as a result of supply chain challenges and increased difficulty accessing shops and markets, and we wanted to investigate this.

“Perhaps surprisingly, we discovered that overall, people’s diets changed very little. If anything, people ate slightly more fruit and veg during lockdown than afterwards.

“The only group which significantly changed their eating habits were women who would otherwise have been commuting over an hour a day. We speculate that replacing the commute with working from home enabled this group to commit time and energy to exploring healthier meals.”

Survey participants were invited to comment on why their shopping and eating habits had changed during lockdown. Some people actively chose to eat a healthier diet in order to improve their chances of resisting the COVID-19 infection. Others more grudgingly began to cook at home because dining out or ordering food for delivery became too difficult under the lockdown restrictions.

The researchers also asked survey participants to rate their health, their life satisfaction and their mental health. People reported being less happy with their lives during lockdown than afterwards, and reported a significant deterioration in their mental health. Young people in full-time education reported the lowest mental health scores.

Professor van Rens added:

“Our study is one of a very small number which survey the same people both during and after lockdown. This means we can be confident that our results reveal actual behavioural change and are not driven by changes in the survey participants. This may also explain why our findings are different from some previous studies that find large changes in diets.”

• Healthy diets, lifestyle changes and well-being during and after lockdown: longitudinal evidence from the West Midlands. van Rens T, Hanson P, Oyebode O, et al BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2022;5: doi: 10.1136/bmjnph-2022-000562
• Listen to a podcast with Professor van Rens discussing the economics of diet and health hereLink opens in a new window.

Sleep and circadian rhythm disruption (SCRD), as encountered during shift work, increases the risk of respiratory viral infection including SARS-CoV-2. However, the mechanism(s) underpinning higher rates of respiratory viral infection following SCRD remain poorly characterised. To address this, we investigated the effects of acute sleep deprivation on the mouse lung transcriptome. Here we show that sleep deprivation profoundly alters the transcriptional landscape of the lung, causing the suppression of both innate and adaptive immune systems, disrupting the circadian clock, and activating genes implicated in SARS-CoV-2 replication, thereby generating a lung environment that promotes viral infection and associated disease pathogenesis. Our study provides a mechanistic explanation of how SCRD increases the risk of respiratory viral infections including SARS-CoV-2 and highlights therapeutic avenues for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
Read the paper hereLink opens in a new window.

The University of Warwick is delighted to announce that Assistant Professor of Engineering, Fatemeh Shahbazi, is among the first members of the new UK Young Academy – a network of early career researchers and professionals established to help tackle local and global issues and promote meaningful change.

As part of the first cohort of 67 members, announced today (10 Jan) by UK and Ireland National Academies, Fatemeh Shahbazi will have the opportunity to help shape the strategy and focus of this new organisation, based on areas that matter to them.

Along with their fellow members from across academia, charity organisations and the private sector, they will have the chance to inform local and global policy discussions, galvanising their skills, knowledge, and experience to find innovative solutions to the challenges facing societies now and in the future.

The UK Young Academy has been established as an interdisciplinary collaboration with prestigious national academies: the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, Learned Society of Wales, Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Irish Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Royal Society. It joins the global initiative of Young Academies, with the UK Young Academy becoming the 50th to join the Young Academy movement.

Fatemeh Shahbazi, Assistant Professor in Engineering, said “I am honoured to be elected as one of the UK Young Academy members. Our main goal is to improve our world by contributing to decision making in the United Kingdom and globally.

I will be working towards the UN sustainable development goals, especially on health, wellbeing, and innovation. With the help of the Royal Society, I am very excited to bring leaders in this field together, hold special events and reach our goals faster.”
ENDS

Notes to Editors:

University of Warwick press office contact:

Bron Mills, Communications Officer: 07824540720. Email: bron.mills@warwick.ac.uk

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/territorialbodies/

In this blog, HRC Doctoral Fellow Charlotte Spear, reflects on how the conference - 'Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis' links to one of the most recent chapters of her own thesis.

Liver cell spheroids are cryopreserved using macromolecular cryoprotectants, which will enable their easy banking and sharing. Read more..;

Researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Warwick, Plymouth and Imperial College are creating an EPSRC-funded network to improve the rates of diagnosis for neurological conditions.

The department would like to congratulate our 2021-2022 MSc students on their end-of-year results. Additional congratulations go to the following outstanding students, who have been awarded academic prizes:

	Herby Bowen - best overall graduating MSc student in Computer Science
	George Wright - best MSc dissertation in Computer Science entitled "Countering Antimicrobial Resistance with Machine Learning"
	Kartik Jain - best overall graduating MSc student in Data Analytics and best MSc dissertation in Data Analytics entitled "Football analytics: A novel approach to estimate success"

Congratulations to Sophie Wong, who took part in the experimental mooting event at the VU Amsterdam in late November 2022. The international moot was attended by teams from China, Indonesia, Rwanda, the Netherlands, Zimbabwe, and the UK (represented by Sophie).