Computer Science News
Kaihua Qin joins the department as an Assistant Professor
We are happy to announce that Dr Kaihua Qin has joined the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. Before joining Warwick, he was a researcher at Yale University and completed his PhD at Imperial College London.
Kaihua鈥檚 research spans computer security with a particular focus on blockchain systems. His past work has revealed critical vulnerabilities in blockchains, such as MEV and imitation attacks, which affect multiple layers of the stack, from networking and consensus to applications. His current work aims to establish provable security for decentralized systems, drawing on techniques from program analysis, distributed computing, formal verification, applied cryptography, and game theory.
In addition, he is actively exploring the use of AI for security, leveraging recent advances in large language models to enhance vulnerability discovery, assessment, and mitigation across a variety of systems.
We welcome him to the department!
Warwick Computer Science and Medical School researchers team up with Intelligent Imaging Innovation to develop smart microscopy tools
We are delighted to congratulate Dr Scott Brooks, a former DCS graduate (MEng, 2016–2020), on his new role as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Associate.
Following the successful completion of his iCASE PhD, supervised by Professors Till Bretschneider (DCS) and Andrew McAinsh at Warwick Medical School, Scott has been awarded a 30-month KTP position, funded by Innovate UK. In collaboration with Intelligent Imaging Innovations (3i), he will develop smart microscopy software (CelFDrive) building on the prototype tools he created during his PhD.
Scott鈥檚 work leverages machine learning to automatically identify cells with rare or subtle biological features, often missed by human observers, enabling faster and more accurate analysis. This innovation accelerates fundamental biological research and establishes a foundation for high-throughput drug discovery.

For more details, see the official announcement:
Undergraduate Prize Winners 2024/25
We really enjoyed celebrating with our fantastic graduating students on Friday. If you have Instagram you can to see the highlights!
We would like to wish all our graduates all the best in their future work or study.
Click the link to view our 2024/25 prize winners.
Best Paper Award at STOC 2025
We are delighted to announce that a result coauthored by and (from our Theory and Foundations Research Division), along with (University of Waterloo), (Northeastern University), (Tel Aviv University) and (ETH Zurich), has received a best paper award at the upcoming (STOC), 2025. STOC is a flagship international conference in theoretical computer science.
The paper, titled "," tackles a fundamental, textbook edge-coloring problem: Given a graph G with n vertices and m edges, the goal is to assign a color to each edge such that no two edges sharing a common endpoint receive the same color. A classical result by Vizing, dating back to 1960s, proves that any simple graph can always be edge-colored with at most 螖 + 1 colors, where 螖 is the maximum degree of a vertex. Vizing's original proof is inherently algorithmic and immediately gives an O(mn) time algorithm for computing such a coloring.
This problem has seen a long and influential line of research aimed at designing faster algorithms for this basic task. For over four decades, the best-known runtime was 脮(m鈭歯), a significant barrier that was only broken in 2024 through concurrent, independent works. The recent paper culminates this effort by providing a randomized algorithm that computes a 螖 + 1 edge coloring in O(m log 螖) time, a running time that is near-linear in the input size.
Latest academic promotions
We are very happy to announce four recent promotions in the department effective from 1 August 2025:
- Dr Jonathan FossLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
- Dr Ayse Saliha SunarLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
- Dr Adam ShephardLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Assistant Professor
- Dr Greg WatsonLink opens in a new window has been promoted to Associate Professor
Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!
Best PhD Thesis Prize in Computer Science 2025
Congratulations to Peter Kiss who has been awarded the Best PhD Thesis Prize in Computer Science 2025.
"Keep up your outstanding performance and best wishes for your career!" - Florin