Departmental news

Calls are now open for the Early Career Fellowships scheme from the Leverhulme Trust for 2026 entry.

Prospective candidates are asked to submit the following information to artsprojsupport@warwick.ac.uk by the internal deadline of 5.00pm on Friday 21 November 2025:

• A short description of their proposed project (maximum 2 A4 pages)
• A copy of their CV (maximum 2 A4 pages)
• The names of three referees. Please note that referees will not be asked to provide a statement at this stage

Eligibility criteria are as follows. Candidates must:

• hold a doctoral degree by the time they take up the Fellowship. If currently registered for a doctorate, they must have submitted their thesis by 4pm on 19 February 2026
• not yet have held a permanent academic appointment, although the Trust will consider applications from candidates with permanent posts that do not include any research
• not have held or currently hold a comparable funded post-doctoral position of three years’ duration or longer to pursue their own research
• not currently hold or have held postdoctoral positions to pursue their own independent research totalling 3 or more years
• have submitted their doctoral thesis for viva voce examination no more than four years prior to the closing date. Those who submitted their thesis earlier than 19 February 2022 are not eligible to apply, unless they have since had a career break
• either hold a degree from a UK higher education institution at the time of taking up the Fellowship or at the time of the application deadline hold a non-permanent academic position in the UK (e.g. fixed-term lectureship, fellowship) which commenced no less than 4 months prior to 19 February 2026

This week we are delighted to interview Teaching Fellow Dr Paula Hollstein Barria, for our Warwick Law School Staff Spotlight series.

Dr Raj Pandya from the Department of Chemistry has been named as this year's recipient of the Henry Moseley Medal and Prize.

On Friday 10th October, the Warwick Economics Society hosted Nobel Laureate and former Warwick Economics student Professor James Robinson (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2024) for an intellectually rich and wide-ranging conversation that bridged rigorous economic theory with deeply personal insight.

The event opened with an introduction by Professor Sascha Becker, Professor of Economics at Warwick and a leading scholar of economic history and political economy. He was followed by Emeritus Professor Marcus Miller, Professor Robinson's former tutor at Warwick, whose opening question drew a subtle connection between Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty and Robinson's hypothesis – articulated in The Narrow Corridor - that liberty emerges only when there is a delicate balance of power between a strong state and a strong society.

Co-Head of Talks Maria Kirpichnikova then led a fascinating interview-style conversation that explored the intellectual journey behind Professor Robinson's ground-breaking work. The discussion ranged from the formative experiences that sparked his research interest in global inequality, to extensive fieldwork across Latin America and Africa; and Professor Robinson shared how conversations with ordinary people, not just policymakers, shaped his understanding of development.

A significant portion of the afternoon centred on Professor Robinson's recent work on "wealth in people," a framework that challenges Western economic assumptions about property as wealth. He explained how engaging with this cultural concept - that wealth resides in social connections rather than material accumulation - has helped countries like Botswana to prosper where others struggled. This insight, with its links to his Nobel Prize-winning research on institutions, will surely have important implications for contemporary development policy.

Robinson also reflected candidly on the craft of economics itself: the challenge of writing for both academic and popular audiences, the tension between personal values and analytical rigour, and the intellectual curiosity that drives his work beyond the lecture hall.

The event concluded with questions from an engaged audience, followed by Maria's closing remarks which emphasised the importance of applying what had been learned. For those attending the event in person, it was a rare opportunity to witness scholarship at its finest: rigorous, humble, and profoundly human.

Thank you to Maria Kirpichnikova (Year 2 EPAIS) for submitting the article.

The ABSPIE Lab participated in the IUPESM World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering 2025. In this congress, the ABSPIE Lab shared its contributions to affordable, sustainable, and inclusive healthcare technologies, particularly in the context of low-resource settings.

We are thrilled to announce that Warwick Law School has once again achieved outstanding results in the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) 2025, with particularly high levels of student satisfaction across all areas of the survey.

Warwick Law School welcomes a new Associate Professor to our community.

Prior to joining Warwick, Alex Powell was an Associate Professor in Law at Oxford Brookes University, where he also acted as Director of the LLM Programmes.

Key visits to WMG in September 2025 

WMG was pleased to showcase its world-class research facilities and education programmes to international organisations, such as the Monash Centre for Additive Manufacturing, the UK Academic Alliance for Pavement and Highway Engineering and Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry, throughout September.

jimmiev, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Fabrizio Alberti has written the article "How different mushrooms learned the same psychedelic trick" for The Conversation on a new discovery that two different mushrooms have evolved the ability to make the psychedelic psilocybin, the first time that convergent evolution has been observed in two organisms from the fungal kingdom.

We are happy to announce that Dr Kaihua Qin has joined the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. Before joining Warwick, he was a researcher at Yale University and completed his PhD at Imperial College London.

Kaihua’s research spans computer security with a particular focus on blockchain systems. His past work has revealed critical vulnerabilities in blockchains, such as MEV and imitation attacks, which affect multiple layers of the stack, from networking and consensus to applications. His current work aims to establish provable security for decentralized systems, drawing on techniques from program analysis, distributed computing, formal verification, applied cryptography, and game theory.

In addition, he is actively exploring the use of AI for security, leveraging recent advances in large language models to enhance vulnerability discovery, assessment, and mitigation across a variety of systems.

We welcome him to the department!