Latest News

Wariwck Medical School researchers have shaped a new Mental Health Joint Code of Practice, launched by the Construction Leadership Council, that presents solutions to poor mental health in construction.

Congratulations to Professor Glen Burley, Chief Executive of South Warwickshire University NHS Foundation Trust, who has been knighted in the King's Birthday Honours in recognition of his contribution to NHS leadership and, most recently, his national role as NHS England Deputy Chief Executive.

Central England Health PartnersLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window (CEHP) will join the MRC-funded West Midlands Regional Account for Clinical Researchers, supporting clinicians at critical stages in their research careers.

A £4 million NIHR-funded study will screen up to 755,000 babies across England for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), with Warwick leading the critical work to ensure results reach families at the right time, in the right way.

The Lord-Lieutenant of the West Midlands has announced the appointment of Professor Simon Brake as a Deputy Lieutenant for the West Midlands.

Findings of the OPTIMA trial managed by Warwick Clinical Trials Unit could spare many NHS patients a year from unnecessary chemotherapy.

A UK-wide trial, managed by Warwick Medical School, finds that online rehabilitation at home can meaningfully improve quality of life for some intensive care survivors.

Warwick Medical School has been awarded an A+ in the 2026 Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) – one of just two medical schools worldwide to achieve this distinction.

Warwick Medical School academic wins prestigious ASME inclusive medical education award

Congratulations to Emily Róisín Reid, Associate Professor and Director of Student Experience, Employability and Progression at Warwick Medical School, on being named the 2026 recipient of the ASME Chair’s Award for Distinguished HPE Scholarship.

The Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) was impressed with Emily’s decade-long dedication to inclusive education and widening participation which has had a transformative impact on thousands of students and educators. From securing vital student bursaries to leading large-scale anti-racism initiatives, they felt her work perfectly exemplifies the leadership and innovation this award celebrates.

Reflecting on her achievement Emily said “I’m honoured to receive this award, which recognises the important work that colleagues, students and I have worked so hard for over the past decade to make our curricula and learning environments inclusive, equitable and innovative. I’d like to thank all of the amazing colleagues and students that I’ve collaborated with on the many, many projects and initiatives.”

Professor Gavin Perkins, Dean of Medicine said, “Congratulations on receiving this well-deserved award, Emily. Your commitment alongside the collective efforts of your colleagues ensure Warwick Medical School continues to lead the way in inclusive medical education.”

Warwick Medical School students have achieved the highest overall score in the 2026 Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh National Surgical Skills Competition.

We are delighted to announce that Professor Sophie Staniszewska has been awarded the highly prestigious NIHR Senior Investigator award.

A focused scientific meeting on cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors - the cellular machinery that drives cell division, cell migration and the motility and correct distribution of organelles. The programme will include inspiring keynotes from Joe Howard and Kristen Verhey, and provide many speaking opportunities for postdocs and students. Further, we will celebrate the career of Rob Cross and his contributions to kinesin and tubulin biophysics as he transitions into life as Emeritus Professor. The event will also be available via Livestream.

Kinesin molecular motors step directionally along microtubules inside cells, hauling molecular cargoes. This is fundamental to the way cells organise themselves and is crucially important, for example. for brain function. Karnawat et al use single molecule optical trapping to show that replacing kinesin's ATP chemical fuel with ATPγS, in which just one oxygen atom of ATP is replaced with a sulphur, still allows stepping but defeats most of its directional bias. Asking why reveals the mechanism of directional stepping in unprecedented detail.
Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

Colocalisation in microscopy is notoriously difficult to quantify. Here, we applied a new statistical method using the Earth mover's distance to analyse microscopy movies of microtubule-associated proteins moving inside cells. The work was done by Tom Honnor in Julia Brettschneider's group in Statistics in collaboration with the Royle lab in BMS.

Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

Defining the critical VT substrate has been a major focus of R&D teams globally. The importance of functional substrate identification has been reported by several world-renowned groups. However, as we move towards implementation, standardisation of functional extra-stimulus mapping is required. Our work just published in JACC Journals attempts to address this.

What are the important electrogram features that provide the greatest accuracy in defining the VT isthmus?

This international, multicentre study provides insights important to consider as we work towards automation of the approach.

Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

A new Warwick Medical School study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service, has started patient recruitment, potentially offering a solution to improve access to obesity care across the NHS.

Find out more about how W8Buddy began in this BBC news clip

Dr Thomas Barber has been recognised by ‘Scholar GPSLink opens in a new window’ as highly ranked scholar in field of obesity for the last 5 years, placed in the top 0.05% of all scholars in the specialty worldwide, and ranked number 37Link opens in a new window in the world.

The paper describes the development of ShapeSpaceExplorer, an interactive software package that makes it easy to analyse cell morphology without any prior knowledge of relevant shape features and in particular enables tracking how cell shape changes dynamically. At the core of our software is a new and efficient method to measure the similarity of two shapes. Pairwise distances from all shapes in the dataset are used to position each shape in a low-dimensional map of shape space. The user can explore this shape space and visualise average shapes from any region of interest, partition shape space to analyse shape distributions from different experimental conditions or measure the speed of shape changes between two regions of shape space. We also show that shape dynamics information is sufficient to predict when migrating cells change direction.
Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

The University of Warwick has announced the launch of a new spin-out company, VerIQ Limited, to transform how medical device and health technology clinical trials are designed, initiated and delivered across the UK.

Warwick Medical School has officially launched its Community First Responder scheme, part of the wider regional scheme led by West Midlands Ambulance Service University NHS Foundation Trust.

Our final-year medical students had an invaluable opportunity to deepen their understanding of a wide range of rheumatology conditions recently through a direct patient interaction day of teaching.

Congratulations to MB ChB student Grace Fisher, who has been named joint winner of the 2025 Medical Student Essay Prize from the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Perinatal Psychiatry.

Congratulations to the Dean of Warwick Medical School, Professor Gavin Perkins, who has received the Resuscitation Science Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. This prestigious award recognises Gavin’s significant contributions to resuscitation research, including leading major trials evaluating mechanical chest compression devices, adrenaline and intraosseous vascular access.

Three Warwick Medical School academics have been named in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researcher List 2025.