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Science, Engineering and Medicine Prizes and Fellowships 2019-2020

2020

  • Professor David Roper from the School of Life Sciences has been awarded a highly prestigious $250k Schaefer Research Scholars Program Award to undertake research at Columbia University in New York, USA, from October 2020. These awards are made to four research scientists annually who have distinguished themselves in the science of human physiology. His project is entitled “Molecular Machines that Synthesize the Bacterial Cell Wall.” Read more...
  • Professor Sandra Chapman from the Department of Physics has been selected to give the Ed Lorenz Lecture during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in December 2020. AGU is an international non-profit, scientific organisation working across the full range of earth and space sciences, representing nearly 60,000 members. In her lecture, Professor Chapman will discuss advances in our fundamental understanding of the non-linear plasma physics of our solar system, and how these lead to innovations in quantifying space weather risk, where the observations can be far from ideal. Read more...
  • Dr David Fengwei Xie from WMG has been awarded an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship. Dr Xie's research focuses on sustainable polymer materials and composites for tackling current issues around petro-derived plastics, recycling, and single-use plastics. The Fellowship will allow him to further explore in this important area and to develop functional, biopolymer-based composite materials. Read more...

  • Dr Nicola Rogers from the Department of Chemistry has been presented with the 2020 Inspiration and Industry Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry. The project she developed, entitled ChemBAM, links subjects from the national curriculum to online experiment toolkits to help students use chemistry to understand topics such as water treatment, cancer prevention, DNA mutation or nuclear waste treatment. It helps bring chemistry to life for school children. Read more...
  • Dr Remzi Becer from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded the RSC MacroGroup UK YRM Medal for his outstanding contribution to the development of polymer science. Read more...
  • Dr Katharina Brinkert from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded the Zeldovich Medal by COSPAR, the International Committee on Space Research. The Zeldovich Medals are conferred by the Russian Academy of Sciences and COSPAR to young scientists for excellence and achievements. Read more...
  • Professor Thomas Marsh from the Department of Physics has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for research into Tomographic Imaging of White Dwarf Binary Systems. He will develop indirect imaging techniques to unravel complex variations in the spectra of such stars, in order to map the component stars and any structures in between them. Read more...
  • Professor Yulan He from the Department of Computer Science has received a Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship for her project entitled “Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding.” Her Fellowship focuses on developing a knowledge-aware and event-centric Natural Language Understanding framework that allows computers to understand and infer meaning from text. Read more...

  • Dr Theo Damoulas, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics has received a Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship for his project entitled "Machine Learning Foundations of Digital Twins." He will aim to establish machine learning for AI-enabled 'digital twins' - digital representations of assets and processes that are tied to their physical ‘twins’ through streaming data, information flows and interventions. Read more...
  • Professor Giovanni Montana from WMG has received a Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship for his project entitled “Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Decision Making in Real-World Applications." He will aim to make advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), an area of machine learning which teaches artificial decision makers (such as robots and software agents) how to interact with the world in order to achieve a desired goal. Read more...
  • Dr Amy Grove from Warwick Medical School has received a National Institute for Health Research Advanced Fellowship for her project entitled "Advancing Clinical Leadership in Healthcare Organisations to Mobilise Evidence into Practice: A Mixed Methods Study of Clinical Leadership in Orthopaedic Surgery." Her project focuses on developing research knowledge about the contingency and contextuality of knowledge mobilisation in the NHS to strengthen collaborations between academia and healthcare policymakers. Read more...
  • Dr Adriano Lameira from the Department of Psychology has been awarded a UKRI Future Leader Fellowship for his project "The Ape and the First Word: Understanding the Origins and Evolution of the First Linguistic Structures in the Human Cade through Comparative Research." Dr Lameira, an expert in primatology and the vocal and cultural behaviour of great apes, will use the Fellowship to understand the origins of human speech and language. Read more...

  • Dr David Bate from Warwick Mathematics Institute has received over €1.4 million in funding from the European Research Council. Dr Bate’s project is entitled Structure Theorems for Modern Aspects of Geometric Measure Theory. He has already pioneered new techniques in the field of geometric measure theory and the funding will allow him to set up and lead a research group and expand on his initial work. Read more...
  • Dr Heather Cegla from the Department of Physics has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project entitled "A Pathway to the Confirmation and Characterisation of Habitable Alien Worlds." Her team will seek to understand and disentangle a fundamental barrier on the pathway to confirming other Earths: The stellar surface inhomogeneities from convection. Read more...
  • Dr Bora Karasulu from the Department of Chemistry has received an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship for his project entitled "Exploring All-Solid-State Batteries using First-Principles Modelling: Effective Computational Strategies towards Better Batteries." He will seek to improve all-solid-state battery technology using a bottom-up approach by tackling primary limitations at an atomic level using computational modelling. Read more...
  • Dr Valentina Donzella from WMG has been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Fellowship for a project entitled "Smart Compression of Automotive Environmental Perception Sensors Data and Implications on Perception." She will investigate the amount of data needed to represent the key information, and therefore to be transmitted, in automated vehicles, making them safer and more reliable. Read more...
  • Dr Chunyi Li from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for research into algebraic geometry. Entitled “Stability Condition and Application in Algebraic Geometry” the project will see Dr Li develop the theory of stability conditions by studying some intrinsic questions that motivated the development of this field. Read more...

  • Professor Matthew Turner from the Department of Physics has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to analyse theoretically quasi-2D sheets of active matter in order to explore how the activity of the force-generating process couples to the shape and motion of the surface itself. Read more...
  • Dr Livia Bartok-Partay from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship. Entitled “Novel Computational Routes to Materials Discovery” Dr Bartok-Partay's project will focus on potential energy surfaces (PES) is among the most rapidly developing areas within theoretical chemistry and condensed matter physics. Read more...

  • Professor Peiying Li from the School of Life Sciences has received an Academy of Medical Sciences Newton Advanced Fellowship for his project "Intermittent Fasting Mediated Metabolic Reprogramming Reshapes the T-Cell Immunity and Preserves White Matter Integrity after Stroke." Read more...
  • Dr Connie Qian from WMG has been awarded an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship. Dr Qian aims to develop sophisticated process simulation models for compression moulding of prepreg and fibre based Sheet Moulding Compound (SMC), and ultimately deliver a model for the hybrid moulding process. Read more...
  • Dr Rebecca Nealon from the Department of Physics has received a Stephen Hawking Fellowship to join Warwick to research protoplanetary discs – the birthplaces of planets. She is one of the first recipients of the Fellowships, which were launched by UKRI and recognise Stephen Hawking’s exceptional contributions to scientific knowledge and popularisation of physics. Read more...
  • Dr Diana Palacio Lozano from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a project entitled “Towards Greener Biofuels: A New Method to Reveal Structural Insights into Bio-Oils.” Given the complexity of bio-oils, gaining structural insights for individual molecules in complex mixtures is challenging. Dr Palacio Lorenzo will explore an alternative method to reveal the fine print of the chemistry in complex mixtures. Read more...

  • Dr Suhaib Fahmy from the School of Engineering has been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for his project entitled "Edge Intelligence for Real World Distributed Machine Learning." He will will explore novel computing architectures to enable efficient inference and training of neural network models near the edge of the network. Read more...
  • Professor Layi Alatise from the School of Engineering has been awarded a Royal Society Industry Fellowship for his project entitled "A New Generation of Automotive IGBTs and Gate Drivers for Future Electric Vehicles." He will undertake research into the feasibility of a new generation of silicon insulated gate bipolar transistors and silicon PiN diodes for automotive traction applications. Read more...
  • Professor Boris Gaensicke from the Department of Physics aims to carry out the first census of all stars near the Sun. With his Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, he will measure mass, temperature, chemical abundance and ages of stars. Read more...

  • Dr Joe Lyman from the Department of Physics has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. His research will examine new frontiers in transient astrophysics, and focus on areas such as where the elements of the Universe formed, what happens when two of the densest objects in the universe crash into each other and the ultimate fate of the universe. Read more...
  • Dr Byron Carpenter from the School of Life Sciences has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for his project entitled “Developing a synthetic signalling system capable of the precise spatial and temporal control of protein function in living cells.” The project aims to redesign natural cellular signalling pathways to create a powerful tool for controlling eukaryotic cell behaviour. Read more...
  • Dr Erin Connelly from the School of Life Sciences has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for her project "Datamining medieval medical texts for modern medicines.” Datamining of medieval medical texts using the tools of network analysis is a new way to evaluate combinations of antimicrobial ingredients in medieval recipes, and to identify significant ingredient combinations from an antimicrobial perspective. Read more...
  • Dr Simon Myerson from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. Entitled “From Diophantine Equations to Dispersive PDEs”, his project will focus on nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations (nonlinear dispersive PDEs) - a type of mathematical model which describes physical systems such as ocean waves and fibre optic cables. Read more…

  • Professor Dieter Wolke from the Department of Psychology has been named as the British Psychological Society’s winner of the award for Distinguished Contributions to British Developmental Psychology. Read more...
  • Professor Marin Alexe from the Department of Physics has received a prestigious Humboldt Research Award, recognising the breadth and depth of his research career in condensed matter physics. Read more...
  • Professor Matthew Gibson from the Department of Chemistry and Warwick Medical School has received €2 million from the European Research Council to investigate new methods to store and transport Biologics. Read more...
  • Dr Mika Vesterinen from the Department of Physics has been awarded over €1.8 million from the European Research Council for a project to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical forces of nature, using one of the particle detectors at the CERN facility. Read more...
  • Dr Tom Gur from the Department of Computer Science has been awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) from UKRI. Dr Gur's research will focus on pushing the boundaries of classical and quantum verifiable computing and its real-world applications. Its primary objective is to develop a wide arsenal of tools that would open new possibilities for meeting the challenges imposed by big data. Read more...
  • Dr R Svaldi from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded an EPSRC Fellowship for a research project entitled "Moduli and Boundedness Problems in Geometry." The aim of the project is to show that there are essentially finitely many families of Calabi-Yau varieties with some extra piece of structure - an elliptic fibration - in any dimension. Read more...

  • Dr Sam Chow from Warwick Mathematics Institute has received an EPSR Postdoctoral Fellowship for a project entitled "New Techniques for Old Problems in Number Theory." Through this research project, he aims to develop a wide range of innovative new techniques to bear on fundamental problems in number theory, leading to major scientific advances, and the development of novel intradisciplinary methods. Read more...
  • Professor Patrick Unwin from the Department of Chemistry has received the 2019 Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Electrochemistry. This is awarded by the American Chemical Society and recognises his internationally-leading research in the development of frontier instrumental techniques in electrochemistry, electrocatalysis, energy research, sensor systems, material characterisation and the life sciences. Read more...
  • Professor Julie MacPherson from the Department of Chemistry has received the 2019 Geoffrey Barker Medal. The Medal is awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry Electrochemistry Group to an electrochemist working in the UK or Ireland in recognition of their contributions to any field of electrochemistry. Her research covers a number of application-driven themes centred around electrochemistry, materials science, and new characterisation techniques. Read more...
  • Dr Sebastian Pike from the Department of Chemistry has received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for his project entitled "Metal-Oxo Clusters: Photoactive & Catalytic Materials at the Molecular Scale." His research focuses on synthesis, photochemistry and reactivity of molecular metal-oxo clusters. Read more...
  • Professor Seb Perrier from the Department of Chemistry has received the 2019 Macro Group UK Medal for his exceptional contribution to the field of polymer science. His research focuses on polymers and nano-technology, and includes developing ways of ensuring cancer drugs target the right part of the body. Read more...
  • Dr Christopher Williams from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded an EPSR Postdoctoral Fellowship for a project entitled "Constructions and Properties of P-adic L-functions for GL(n)." His research focuses on number theory, and in particular in Iwasawa theory. Read more...
  • Dr Igor Carboni Oliveira from the Department of Computer Science has received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for his project entitled "New Approaches to Unconditional Computational Lower Bounds." His research focuses on computational complexity theory and its connections to algorithms, combinatorics and mathematical logic - particularly unconditional computational lower bounds and their applications. Read more...
  • Dr Nikolay Cherkasov from the School of Engineering has received a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship for his project entitled "Cost-efficient Pharma Synthesis in Catalyst-Coated Tubes." His research focuses on areas such as catalysts for hydrogenation, catalysis in thin layers, digitising heterogeneous catalysis, mechanisms of catalytic reactions, process automation and predictive process control. Read more...
  • Dr Paul Wilson from the Department of Chemistry has received a Royal Society University Research Fellowship for his project entitled "Nano and Mesoscopic Control over 3D Surface Topography using Localised Electrochemical Synthesis." His research interests include catalyst economy in copper catalysed radical cyclisation and polymerisation reactions and 'click' chemistry as a route to multifunctional polymer materials. Read more...
  • Professor Peter Sadler from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI) in recognition of his monumental contributions to chemical sciences particularly to chemistry in areas of chemistry of metals in medicine. Read more...
  • Professor Peter Sadler from the Department of Chemistry has been elected as a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Academy recongises the best European scientists with a vision for Europe as a whole. Read more...
  • Professor Peter Sadler from the Department of Chemistry has been elected as elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. The Honorary Fellow is the highest honour that CCS bestows on an individual, and it is only conferred to the distinguished chemists of the world who have made significant contributions to the advancement of chemistry. Read more...
  • Dr Maria Liakata from the Department of Computer Science has received a Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellowship. Entitled "Creating Time Sensitive Sensors from User-Generated Language and Hetergenous Content", her Fellowship will focus on creating time sensitive sensors from language and heterogeneous user generated content. Read more...
  • Dr Giuseppe Cannizzaro from the Department of Statistics has received an EPSRC Research Fellowship for his project entitled "The Emergence of Universal Behaviour for Growth Models, Stochastic PDEs and Random Operators." Focusing on Probability Theory, Statistical Mechanics and Stochastic Analysis, this proposal will benefit researchers in these areas, as it will seek to develop answers to many fundamental questions in this field, and develop a whole new spectrum of tools and techniques. Read more...

  • Dr Erin Greaves from Warwick Medical School has received an MRC Career Development Award Fellowship for her project entitled "Neuroinflammation in Endometriosis: Macrophages Behaving Badly?" to investigate how and why macrophages play a role in endometriosis-associated pain and general increased sensitivity to pain. Read more...

  • Steven Hindmarsh has received the Papin Prize for technical excellence in supporting a Core Research Facility – The Electron Microscopy Research Technology Platform. The award was presented at HETS 2019, which aims to share best practice amongst higher education technical staff. Read more...

  • Dr Matt Kenzie from the Department of Physics has been awarded an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship for his project entitled "Getting a Flavour for New Physics with Precision Measurements of Tree-Level Beauty Decay." The project uses data from the Large Hadron Collider to look for new fundamental physics particles which can help to explain the matter-antimatter discrepancy. Read more...
  • Dr Wei He from the School of Engineering has been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship for a project entitled “Smart Multi-Functional Affordable Solar Home (SMASH) for Rural India." Read more...
  • Dr Chris Williams from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded an EPSRC Fellowship for a research project entitled "Constructions and properties of p-adic L-functions for GL(n)." Read more...
  • Dr Reinhard Maurer from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for a project which will simulate and develop chemical reactions fuelled by sunlight and greenhouse gases. Read more...

  • Dr Benjamin Richards from the Department of Physics has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Dr Richards will measure the rate and energy of neutrinos that arrive from distant supernovae throughout the galaxy. The properties of these neutrinos will tell us much about the wider composition of the universe and will allow us to test the rate of black hole formation in the universe. Read more...
  • Dr Siddartha Khastgir from Warwick Manufacturing Group has been awarded a Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) from UKRI. Mr Khastgir's research will focus on the global Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) industry, which is predicted to be worth more than £50billion globally by 2035. Read more...
  • Dr Minkyung Kang from the Department of Chemistry has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Dr Kang will investigate and expand current understandings and possibilites of CO2 recycling through artificial photosynthesis. This technique converts atmospheric CO2 to sustainable fuels and chemicals. Read more...
  • Dr Shiwani Singh from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Dr Singh will use her Fellowship to develop an approximation-free and computationally efficient multi-scale modelling approach for polymer solutions. Read more...
  • Professor Gavin Perkins, Director of Warwick Clinical Trials Unit, has been made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was selected for his outstanding contributions to advancing medical science, cutting edge research discoveries, and translating developments into benefits for patients and society. Read more...
  • Professor Richard Lilford from Warwick Medical School has been made a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was selected for his outstanding contributions to advancing medical science, cutting edge research discoveries, and translating developments into benefits for patients and society. Read more...
  • Professor John Ellis from the School of Life Sciences, has been honoured in the Biochemical Society's annual Awards. The awards recognise scientists for the excellence of their work and the impact it has had within the bioscience community and wider society. Read more...
  • Professor Julian Gardner from the School of Engineering has been named as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his outstanding contributions to the areas of electronic noses and gas sensors. Read more...
  • Professor Peter Sadler from the Department of Chemistry and Dr Pingyu Zhang from China's Shenzhen University, have been shortlisted for the Newton Prize - their research project explores innovative therapeutic approaches to the discovery of novel drugs to treat endemic and resistant cancers in China. Read more...
  • Dr Hong Lui from Warwick Mathematics Institute has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to continue his work into the rapidly evolving mathematical field of extremal combinatorics. Read more...