The National Automotive Innovation Centre (NAIC), situated in the Prof. Lord Bhattacharyya Building at the University of Warwick, has been shortlisted in the ‘Workplace’ category of the 2021 AJ Architecture Awards.

Recognising excellence in UK architecture, these highly coveted awards are unique to the market, with the winners published in a special edition of the Architects' Journal. The Workplace category is defined as ‘new-build refurbished architectural projects for workplaces completed between January 2019 and July 2021.’

To qualify for the category, the workplace in question must exceed 10,000m², an entry requirement the Centre comfortably eclipses with its 33,000m² of space for engineers, designers and academics to enjoy.

The Centre was officially opened in February 2020 by HRH The Prince of Wales. A partnership between WMG, University of Warwick, Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Motors, the Centre is the largest of its kind in Europe. Its unveiling was well-timed too, arriving during a global mobility revolution, a new age for transport mobility.

The Centre is driving the future of the automotive industry from the heart of the United Kingdom. A beacon for automotive research, it brings together the brightest minds from industry and academia, to develop future vehicles and mobility solutions.

Designed by Cullinan Studios, the brief for the Centre was for simplicity and strength of purpose, turning a complex assembly of spaces into an immediately legible building.

The AJ Architecture Awards winners will be revealed during a celebratory event on 17 November 2021 at the Grosvenor House, London.

Congratulations to Michael Pounds (Senior Tutor/ Director of Student Experience) who has won a Warwick Award for Personal Tutoring Excellence (WAPTE). The WAPTE awards recognise staff who have made an outstanding contribution to the support of students through the University's personal tutoring system.

Many congratulations to WMG’s Professor Margaret Low as she receives an MBE for her services to public engagement and widening participation.

Margaret joined WMG back in 1988, and for many years she has made it her mission to inspire young people from all backgrounds in STEM subjects and into higher education.

She has dedicated her time to develop innovative outreach activities for young people - connecting the local community with academia and promoting STEM in an engaging way.

Professor Margaret Low said: “It’s lovely, if a little overwhelming and totally unexpected, to be recognised in this way. Everything I’ve achieved has been in collaboration with fantastic colleagues and friends at WMG and across the University. None of this would have been possible without their hard work and dedication.

“I’ve also had the good fortune to work with some brilliant students through Warwick Volunteers who’ve been instrumental in bringing outreach activities into schools.”

About Professor Low

Working with Warwick Volunteers, she collaborates with University of Warwick students to run Scratch workshops in local primary and secondary schools reaching more than 250 children each year through the Technology Volunteers project.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Margaret and her team also developed invaluable resources to help support home-schooling.

In 2016 Margaret was awarded an HEA National Teaching Fellowship. The Fellowships recognise and celebrate the absolute highest standards of learning and teaching across higher education.

More than a decade ago she pioneered the use of Scratch in the UK, a user-friendly programming tool, for outreach work in schools.

Many congratulations to Drs Elena Cukanovaite, James Gott and Samuele Ferracin, for their success in the 2021 PhD Thesis Prize competition. Elena won the Winton Prize for Astrophysics, James was awarded the Springer Thesis Prize, while Samuele is the recipient of the Faculty of Science and Department of Physics Thesis prize. Read on for more details about the prizes and their research.

Professor Sandra Chapman (CFSA) awarded the 2020 Ed Lorenz Lecture for the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – which will be one of the world’s largest virtual scientific conferences [1-17 December 2020]. The Ed Lorenz Lecture is given on topics in non-linear physics across all for space and geophysics. Lecture will explore how advances in fundamental physics can help quantify space weather risk.

Congratulations to Neil Wilson for winning the RMS Mid-Career Scientific Achievement Award for 2020.

The aim of the RMS Mid-Career Scientific Achievement Award is to celebrate and mark outstanding scientific achievements in any area of microscopy or flow cytometry for established, mid-career researchers.

Three Physics postgraduates have been recognised by the University for their excellence in teaching.

Sam Holt of the Superconductivity and Magnetism group is the winner of a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence, and Jack Bradshaw (CFSA) and Sam Ferracin (Theory) received commendations.

Congratulations to all.

Dr Joseph Lyman of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group is one of four Warwick academics to receive a highly-prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in the third round of awards.

Joe's project, titled "New frontiers in transient astrophysics: gravitational-wave multi-messenger events and exotic stellar explosions", is devoted to furthering our understanding of the changing night sky. Astrophysical transients, in the form of exploding stars as supernovae, and merging neutron stars as gravitational-wave events, are some of the most energetic events in the Universe and probe physics under conditions far beyond our capabilities on Earth.

As we don't know where or when these events will occur, the fellowship will develop and exploit the Warwick-led Gravitational wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) project as a discovery machine to find new and exotic transients. It will also create of a rapid network of telescope facilities to follow these GOTO discoveries, making it possible to take detailed observations almost immediately after discovery, and allowing us to open new windows in study of these extreme explosions.

Joe joins Dr Heather Cegla and Dr Benjamin Richards as Future Leaders Fellows in the Department of Physics. See https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/ukri_fellowships_awarded_to_four_university_of_warwick_academics1 for a Warwick press release.

The department congratulates:

• Richard Beanland
• Tom Hase
• John Hanna, and
• Neil Wilson

on their promotion to Professor.

Marin Alexe of the Functional Electronic Materials group has received a prestigious Humboldt Research Award, recognising the breadth and depth of his research career in Condensed Matter Physics. Marin will work with academics in Germany to undertake research projects at the Martin Luther University, Halle/Saale and Technical University, Darmstadt.

Further information can be found at http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/programmes-by-target-group.html