Departmental news

Jeremias Knoblauch has been awarded the 2023 Savage Award of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for his Warwick PhD thesis.

The 2024 National Student Survey (NSS) results published recently show that Warwick Economics students remain highly satisfied with their undergraduate courses, with 90% of the respondents stating that they would recommend Warwick to future students.

The annual national survey took place between February and April 2024, and we recorded a high response rate of 78%, four percentage points higher than last year.

The annual UK-wide survey asks undergraduate finalists about the quality of their courses, with 28 questions grouped into seven areas: Teaching; Academic Support; Learning Opportunities; Learning Resources; Assessment & Feedback; Organisation & Management and Student Voice.

The Department of Economics continues to perform strongly across all areas with highest scores in:

• Teaching on my course: nearly 90% of respondents were happy with the teaching stating that staff were good at explaining things, making the subject engaging and that the course was intellectually stimulating and challenged them to achieve their best work.
• Academic support: 90% of the surveyed students were pleased with the ways teaching staff supported their learning.
• Learning Resources: 92% of respondents were happy with the available learning resources such as the IT and library resources as well as access to subject specific resources.

Compared to 2023 we have made improvements across six of the seven main areas of the survey, with percentage points noted in brackets: Assessment and Feedback (2.8); Student Voice (2.5); Teaching (1.9); Learning Resources (1.7); Academic Support (1.3) and Learning Opportunities (0.9).

The position of the Department in comparison with other Departments within the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, remains strong, with Warwick Economics ranking 2nd for Teaching on My Course; 3rd for Learning Opportunities, Assessment and Feedback, Learning Resources, and Student Voice; and 4th for Academic Support and Organisation & Management.

Head of Department, Professor Ben Lockwood commented:

“I’m very pleased to see that our NSS scores remain high, considering that the class of 2024 cohort of undergraduate students was the largest in the history of the Department, with 522 of finalists (78% response rate) responding to the survey.

“We take the feedback received through the NSS very seriously, as it provides us with invaluable insights into what’s important to our students, what we do well, and which areas of our teaching we should improve further.

“I would like to pass on thanks to all staff for their hard work, particularly during the Covid years which affected this cohort of students.

“I would also like to thank this year’s finalists, now graduates of Class 2024, for rating their student experience at Warwick Economics so highly, despite the difficulties they had to overcome during the Covid pandemic. We’re delighted to see that 90 per cent of our finalists would recommend Warwick to prospective students.”

Exciting Warwick photochromic chemistry features in the latest edition of SCI Chemistry & Industry (C&I) Magazine.

We demonstrate the cryopreservation of vero-cells in assay ready format using macromolecular cryoprotectants and induce ice nucleation.

Congratulations to the members of the department who have received a promotion this year.

Our 2024 summer graduation took place on Thursday 18 July, celebrating the fantastic achievements of our BSc Health & Medical Sciences students, our inaugural cohort of MSci Integrated Natural Sciences students and our MB ChB, Master's and PhD students.

Photo reversible deactivation radical polymerization and, in particular, photoiniferter-reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (PI-RAFT) polymerization have become popular approaches to polymer synthesis in recent years. There is, however, a lack of fundamental investigations concerning the mechanism and kinetics of such reactions.

Six papers co-authored by DIMAP and Theory and Foundations researchers were presented earlier in July at ICALP 2024, the 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming:

• Rohan Acharya, Marcin Jurdzinski, Aditya Prakash: Lookahead Games and Efficient Determinisation of History-Deterministic Büchi Automata,
• Dmitry Chistikov, Alessio Mansutti, Mikhail R. Starchak: Integer Linear-Exponential Programming in NP by Quantifier Elimination,
• Artur Czumaj, Guichen Gao, Shaofeng H.-C. Jiang, Robert Krauthgamer, Pavel Veselý: Fully-Scalable MPC Algorithms for Clustering in High Dimension,
• Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Robert Ganian, Iyad Kanj, M. S. Ramanujan: Parameterized Algorithms for Coordinated Motion Planning: Minimizing Energy,
• Julian Dörfler, Christian Ikenmeyer: Functional Closure Properties of Finite ℕ-Weighted Automata,
• Zhenjian Lu, Rahul Santhanam: Impagliazzo's Worlds Through the Lens of Conditional Kolmogorov Complexity.

ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). This year's ICALP took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 8th to 12th of July 2024.

Dmitry's paper "Integer Linear-Exponential Programming in NP by Quantifier Elimination" won the Best Paper Award of ICALP's Track B, which is a flagship research meeting on Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming. The paper studies the following problem: given a system of linear equations and constraints of the form y=2^x, does it have a solution over the natural numbers? By using and extending a method that generalises Gaussian elimination, Dmitry and his co-authors Alessio Mansutti and Mikhail Starchak show that the problem belongs to the complexity class NP. This result provides a way to efficiently certify the existence of a solution, even if all solutions are very big (towers of exponentials).

This is the second time in a row that this award goes to a Warwick paper: Henry Sinclair-Banks, a DIMAP PhD student, was an awardee in 2023.

CAMDU are pictured receiving their award from Professor Stuart Croft, Vice-Chancellor and President of Warwick.

CAMDU provides researchers with access, support and training on state-of-the-art light microscopes. In addition they input into research with highly specialised knowledge and train the next generation of scientists.

Congratulations to the outstanding team - Maelle, Laura, David and Tim.