Awards for investigation and prediction: News from the College

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From a researcher’s award for investigating nanoscience, to a student’s selection to represent the UK in an international quant competition, here is some quick-read news from across the College.

Awe-inspiring award

Professor Molly Stevens, of Imperial’s Departments of Materials and Bioengineering, has won the 2019 Kabiller Young Investigator Award in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine.

This $10,000 award, given by Northwestern University in the US, recognises her recent work in developing connected diagnostics technologies. A number of technologies have been designed and applied including using smartphone technology to track outbreaks of Ebola in low income countries.

The award selection committee said: “These mobile health connected platforms (could) transform the way we respond to epidemics by enabling rapid, accurate and cheap testing, data sharing, and geographical tagging.”

Professor Stevens will officially receive her award at a celebratory banquet in Chicago on 13 November.

She said: “I am delighted that my team’s work has been recognized by this award and am very proud of the talented multidisciplinary postdocs and students in our group, and indebted to our collaborators within the Regenerative Medicine Platform Hub and the i-sense consortium.

“Together, we hope to make a difference in the engineering of nanomaterials to detect diseases earlier and regenerate organs.”

Software reliability

Dr Cristian Cadar, of Imperial’s Department of Computing, has won the British Computing Society’s Roger Needham Award for 2019, to recognise his work in software reliability.

Software reliability is an area of research that helps boost the dependability and security of computer systems.

 The Award recognises his pioneering work in dynamic symbolic execution (DSE), a program analysis technique used by companies such as Fujitsu, IBM, and Microsoft to find errors and security vulnerabilities in complex software systems.

He said: “I’m delighted to have my work recognised in this way. I am grateful to my research team, mentors and collaborators for making this research possible. I also find it heartening that software reliability techniques are receiving so much attention, as these techniques can help create safer and more secure software systems.”

Dr Cadar will give this year’s Needham Lecture at The Royal Society this autumn.

Imperial’s support for technicians

This week Imperial hosted a summer event for more than sixty technicians from seventeen academic departments across the College. The programme included a session on mental health awareness for technical staff, a discussion on the staff survey results, and a talk on technical career pathways within and beyond Higher Education. There was also a small exhibition where technicians had the opportunity to find out more about learning and development opportunities at the College, including volunteering, professional registration, and trade union membership.

Allison Hunter, Technical Operations Manager in the Department of Life Sciences, chaired the event. She said: "As a proud signatory to the Technician Commitment, Imperial is committed to ensuring greater visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability of technical skills for technicians across all disciplines at the College. More information on support for technicians at Imperial, including the Technicians’ Network, is available online."

The qual of quant

Imperial chemistry student Sheng Bi has been selected to represent the UK in the International Quant Championship. This global, three-stage quantitative finance competition takes place on a web-based simulation platform, an online environment where users can translate ideas for predicting the movement of financial markets.

Over 20,000 participants entered the competition, representing 3,000 universities across 140 countries. Sheng has been the UK champion since the start of the competition, and will represent the UK at the final stage in Singapore, competing against 15 other teams from around the globe.

Judges said they were impressed with his knowledge, all of which has been self-taught since joining the competition, his honesty and research-driven approach.

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