Elham Kashefi

We are pleased to announce that Elham Kashefi will be appointed to a Lecturership in the School of Informatics, from 1^st October.

Elham received her BSc. and MSc. degrees, in Mathematics (Major in Combinatorics), from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In 1999 she joined Imperial College of London as a research assistant in the formal methods and programming language group.

She started her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Vlatko Vedral and graduated from department of computing, Imperial College in 2003. Her thesis was on complexity analysis and semantics for quantum computing.

She was then awarded a four-year junior research fellowship at Christ Church College, Oxford to work on foundational structures for quantum information and computation. During this period she spent 2005 in Canada as a post doctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo, to work on depth complexity and parallel computing. From March 2006 until 2007 she was a visiting scientist at MIT, in the Department of Theoretical Physics, exploring the connection between measurement-based models, adiabatic and topological quantum computing.

Elham has recently been awarded a five-year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, which she will hold at Edinburgh, to allow her to focus on measurement-based quantum computing and its relation to other quantum models.

Elham's current research interests include: formalising physical computations, classical cryptography secure against quantum attacks, models of quantum computing and their structural relations, and exploring new applications, algorithms and protocols for quantum computing.

Vincent Danos

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Vincent Danos to a Chair in Computational Systems Biology.

Vincent has pursued various lines of research during his career, from mathematical logic and the semantics of programming languages, to probabilistic and agent-based models, and comes to us from a position as Directeur de Recherches at the CNRS. He has spent the past year visiting the Harvard Medical School, and working in a start-up company trying to bring agent based techniques to bear on the representation of cellular signalling networks.

At Edinburgh he plans to lead the development of an efficient bottom-up simulation platform for cellular signalling, that will enable the rapid generation of cellular insight—including causal information—without requiring significant modeling or quantitative capability from the user.

Informatics International

We have 726 students currently registered for this session: 342 Undergraduates, 150 Taught Postgraduates, and 234 Postgraduate Research students.

342 Undergraduate Students

Including students from 28 countries outwith the UK:

Poland 13, Germany 9, Bulgaria 9, United States of America 8, Greece 7, France 6, Italy 4, Peoples Republic of China 5, Spain 3, Lithuania 3, Luxembourg 3, India 2, Cyprus 2, Japan 2, Belarus 2, Estonia 2, Republic of Ireland 1, Netherlands 1, Canada 1, Austria 1, Malta 1, Romania 1, Czech Republic 1, Finland 1, Jordan 1, Latvia 1, Sri Lanka 1, Ukraine 1.

384 Postgraduate Students

Including students from 51 countries outwith the UK:

Peoples Republic of China 34, Greece 28, India 28, United States of America 21, Germany 20, Italy 12, Republic of Ireland 7, Mexico 7, Pakistan 6, France 5, Thailand 5, Netherlands 4, Malaysia 4, Poland 3, Spain 3, Canada 3, Colombia 3, Nigeria 3, Portugal 3, Taiwan 3, Austria 2, Malta 2, Denmark 2, Israel 2, Republic of Korea 2, Singapore 2, South Africa 2, Sweden 2, Lithuania 1, Luxembourg 1, Belgium 1, Cyprus 1, Japan 1, Romania 1, Albania 1, Australia 1, Bahamas 1, Bahrain 1, Bangladesh 1, Brazil 1, Indonesia 1, Islamic Republic of Iran 1, Lebanon 1, Macedonia 1, Mauritius 1, New Zealand 1, Russia 1, Slovenia 1, Turkey 1, Uzbekistan 1, Venezuela 1.