With the generous support of the Worshipful Company of Engineers, the Academy makes five awards of £3,000 each year to UK engineers in full-time higher education, research or industrial employment, who have demonstrated excellence in the early stage of their career (defined as less than ten years since graduation from their first degree in engineering or equivalent qualification on the day of the submission deadline).
From these five awardees, the Academy’s Awards Committee will select an overall winner who, in addition to their cash award, will receive the Academy’s Sir George Macfarlane Medal.
2024 winners
Dr Alalea Kia
Advanced Research Fellow, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Royal Academy of Engineering Associate Research Fellow, Imperial College London
Winner of the Sir George Macfarlane Medal
Alalea is a researcher, innovator and educator who has developed a patented concrete pavement called Kiacrete. This permeable solution will help to alleviate climate change and urbanisation challenges by absorbing stormwater, mitigating the devastating impact of urban flooding.
Her new climate change resilient permeable pavement has an engineered pore structure that significantly reduces the amount of cementitious material used in concrete pavements, which along with its recycled material use, results in a saving of at least 23 tonnes of CO2 per km for a single carriageway road. Alalea has developed her research idea into a real-world, proven system, and demonstrated its excellent long-term drainage and durability in a field site at Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus, part of the Imperial West Tech Corridor .
Kiacrete has the potential to be used across the built environment, from footpaths to airports, to reduce standing water, improve transport safety and to help achieve net zero carbon emissions. Alalea has secured in excess of £3 million in funding to further develop her pavement technology, and infrastructure operators, engineering consultancies, contractors and suppliers are actively exploring the adoption of her pavement technology.
In addition to her academic research outputs, Alalea has a significant track record in the professional and personal development of colleagues and students through outreach and mentoring.
Dr Ruben Doyle
CEO of Additive Instruments Ltd
Ruben invented and commercialised a surgical impactor device designed for use in orthopaedic surgery. By ensuring appropriate bone preparation and implant seating, Ruben’s patented device minimises the risk of bone fracture during hip replacements, speeds up surgeries and reduces the incidence of repetitive strain injury for surgeons.
During his PhD research at Imperial College, Ruben studied patient dynamics during impaction testing, which he later used to create a patented electronic solenoid-based surgical impactor. The device delivers a pre-set impact energy to seat the implant into a bone, eliminating surgical variability and fracture risk caused by manual mallets.
After patenting his invention, Ruben founded Additive Instruments Ltd and became its CEO, raising funding to grow the company and developing a fully functional verification prototype – a handheld, battery-powered impactor tool that benefits patients by reducing fracture risk, and benefits surgeons by reducing risk of injury and increasing career longevity.
Dr Ishara Dharmasena
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at Loughborough University
Ishara is a world-leading theorist in the field of nanogenerators whose ‘distance-dependent electric field’ theory has revolutionised practices in the development of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG). His work has been pivotal in bringing nanogenerators from a theoretical to a practical state.
His latest research is focused on ‘super-smart textiles’ that use TENG technology to convert body movements into electrical signals. These self-powered sensors will be able to monitor body movements and physiological parameters, providing a low-cost at-home solution that addresses the urgent global need for remote rehabilitation care.
Ishara has demonstrated the potential of this technology with recent prototypes, and is currently working with the UK National Rehabilitation Centre and the textile industry to scale up and expand his work.
He has 25 publications in the top five ranked journals and over 1,000 citations. He holds two patents and has had significant success with research grants and fellowships, having secured over £1 million in research funding.
Jamie Serjeant
Senior Design Engineer at Occuity
Jamie led the development of Occuity’s AX1 axial length meter, which has the potential to transform the way we manage myopia, a leading cause of vision loss. The AX1 enables quick, non-invasive measurement of eyeball length, providing accurate, quantitative monitoring of myopia, which is key to effective clinical intervention.
Jamie’s strong design work and leadership skills enabled him to successfully steer a diverse group of engineers working to bring the AX1 to market rapidly and within tight product specifications.
Jamie has a proven track record of turning early-stage prototypes into impactful commercial products. In a previous role at Occuity, he led the mechanical development of the PM1, a handheld non-contacting pachymeter that was developed to diagnose glaucoma without using ultrasound methods that require physical contact with the eye. Earlier in his career at Dyson, Jamie developed the user interface of Dyson Zone, a personal purifier integrated into noise-cancelling headphones, overcoming numerous engineering challenges while developing the technology.
Nikhila Ravi
Research Engineering Manager at Meta
Nikhila leads an AI Research Engineering team focused on computer vision research in Meta’s Fundamental AI Research group (FAIR). She co-led the open source Segment Anything project, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a universal segmentation model with zero shot generalisation to unseen objects and images, and the Segment Anything 1 Billion dataset (SA-1B), the largest of its kind. Segmentation is the ability to identify the pixels within an image that belong to a specific object of interest, and is an important task in many real-world applications, from photo editing to radiology scans.
Previously, building AI segmentation systems required the creation of custom datasets and training models with them, which was costly and required AI expertise. SAM can be applied to a wide variety of use cases out of the box via prompting, similar to the way that large language models like ChatGPT can perform a range of tasks without requiring custom data or expensive adaptations.
SAM’s commercial use licence has enabled extensive industry wide impact including powering features in Meta’s products, and upleveling workflows in biology and medicine which previously relied on time-intensive manual segmentation.
In her ~7 year tenure at Meta, Nikhila has co-authored 10 publications, garnering over 5300 citations, earning her worldwide recognition as a top researcher.
2023 winners
Professor Harrison Steel
Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Winner of the Sir George Macfarlane Medal
Professor Steel leads a research group developing biotechnologies that facilitate solutions to challenges in biomedicine and the climate crisis. For example, his team repurposes natural bacteria to turn waste products into biodegradable plastics.
To make his experiments more time-efficient, he invented a robotic system to grow bacteria and measure their activity automatically. This prototype became the Chi.Bio bioreactor platform, which is now used internationally for R&D in academia and industry to develop everything from artificial meat to carbon capture technologies.
The affordable device costs less than 5% of the price of commercial bioreactors, making it accessible to startups and researchers in the developing world, and its plans are open source, so researchers can even build one themselves.
Dr Jiaqi Chu
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
Dr Chu is working on novel optical storage and optical computing technologies to tackle the hardest infrastructure challenges facing cloud providers due to the slowdown of Moore’s Law. This predicted continued growth in the capacity and speed of silicon-based computing and has been the guiding principle that has driven the computer chip industry.
She developed a technique to read and write data as holograms into crystal and experimentally demonstrated the highest density of holographic optical data storage achieved to date, as well as quantifying the energy efficiency of such storage and the theoretical limits of its capacity. Her work not only advances scientific understanding in the field but shows a path towards energy-efficient holographic optical storage in the cloud, which has the potential to lower storage costs.
Dr Chu is currently developing a noise-tolerant optical computer that could have a significant impact on the economic and environmental sustainability of AI and optimisation workloads.
Joseph Harvey
Offshore 400kV Senior Authorised Person, SSE Renewables
Joseph Harvey currently works offshore to support safe project delivery on the Dogger Bank Project, which once operational will be the world’s largest offshore wind, while inspiring future leaders and environmental activists with his extensive voluntary work.
He has ‘earned and learned’ since leaving secondary school, benefiting from two apprenticeships, first as a marine engineer with Southern Electronics (UK) and then as a substation engineer at National Grid. He has become an ambassador for apprenticeships through his work for the Science Museum’s Technicians Gallery and within his local community.
Outside his current role at SSE Renewables, Harvey has developed systems to improve substation operations and support sustainable development. He shares his passion for the environment as one of the first members of the UK Young Academy, which was established to help tackle local and global issues and promote meaningful change and was formerly the National Grid Future Business Leader on EY’s Climate Change Business Forum.
Mihir Sheth
CEO of Inspiritus Health; Innovation Fellow at Oxford University Hospital, research assistant at the University of Oxford
Mihir Sheth is developing the StimSprit device with the aim of reducing the length of time patients spend on ventilators.
Having spent time in a district hospital in Senegal understanding the context of ventilation, he began developing the non-invasive electrical muscle stimulator designed to prevent diaphragm atrophy. He engaged more than 50 clinicians when designing the product to ensure it could slot into the existing clinical workflow.
As an Innovation Fellow, he has worked alongside healthcare professionals to co-develop and implemented three innovations within the NHS in the last two years, including a novel method using a sponge to make it easier to cannulate babies in the neonatal ICU and a simplified process to better track urinary catheters and reduce the time and risk of catheter-associated urinary tract infections with the hospital team. As a research assistant, Sheth is also involved in two clinical studies to improve the oxygenation of patients with chronic respiratory diseases using a nanobubble drink.
He mentors and teaches students and healthcare professionals about innovation and discusses engineering entrepreneurship with students.
Dr Fiona Walport
Research Fellow, Imperial College London
Dr Walport is developing an accurate and efficient advanced structural design framework that capitalises on advances in computing power and emerging digital technologies.
By enabling the true behaviour of structures to be represented more accurately, her method allows structural engineers to use materials such as stainless steel more efficiently, which has sustainability and cost benefits. A number of elements from her research findings have already been incorporated into the major European and American stainless steel design standards to facilitate more efficient use of the material, although her work is ongoing.
A STEM ambassador for a number of years, Dr Walport is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has recently been appointed a member of the first cohort of the UK Young Academy.
2022 winners
George Imafidon
Winner of the Sir George Macfarlane Medal
George Imafidon is a performance engineer working with Sir Lewis Hamilton HonFREng’s Team X44 electric racing team. The team draws attention to environmental issues by racing in the world’s most remote locations affected by the climate crisis. George is also CEO and co-founder of Motivez, a platform and community that has directly supported over 8,000 young people aged 14 – 25 from underrepresented backgrounds to access personalised opportunities, particularly within science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
George’s commitment to giving a platform to underrepresented voices was further evidenced by his appointment in September 2020 to the Board of Commissioners for Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Commission, set up jointly with the Royal Academy of Engineering to address the underrepresentation of Black people in UK motorsport. As a young Black engineer, George was able to advise and guide the Commission’s work, introduce the research team to key stakeholders and young engineers for interviews and shape the final report, which attracted high public and political attention.
Dr Robert Hammond
Dr Robert Hammond is Lecturer in Infection and Global Health at the University of St Andrews. He has developed a tool to rapidly identify which antibiotics are effective against a particular infection - giving a result in as little as 37 seconds compared to 12-48 hours for present techniques. This has led to a spinout company, employing more than 25 people, which could transform care and potentially change the course of the antimicrobial resistance pandemic by reducing the use of inappropriate antibiotics.
Dr Fragkoulis Kanavaris
Dr Fragkoulis Kanavaris is Arup’s leading concrete materials specialist. He is a world-renowned authority on concrete decarbonisation, durability, cracking and technology and is currently materials lead on the High Speed 2 rail project.
Concrete’s unique properties make it vital to many engineering endeavours but the material is not known for its green credentials. Fragkoulis is changing this through shaping UK and global technical standards and helping deliver huge carbon savings for clients. He also identifies ways to reduce waste, such as by converting HS2's excavated London clay into supplementary cementitious to reduce the volume sent to landfill by about 30% and cut the proportion of Portland cement used by up to 70%.
Dr Matthew Marson
Dr Matthew Marson, Global Market Sector Director at Arcadis, has spearheaded the advance of smart buildings and cities with a portfolio including NEOM’s Industrial City, 22 Bishopsgate, The Dock in Dublin, Paddington Square and San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower.
Matthew has pioneered new techniques, using intelligent building technologies to help the industry become more sustainable and make progress towards net zero carbon. For example, he led a team to extract the data from several building management systems across a 3 million square foot technology company campus in Bangalore. He created an analytics application that analysed around 50,000 data points per minute to help optimise energy conservation measures, making a significant contribution to their net zero carbon target.
Dr Beatriz Mingo
Dr Beatriz Mingo is a materials engineer and Presidential Fellow at the University of Manchester, whose research focuses on environmentally friendly surface treatments for light alloys. As an Academy Research Fellow, she is developing high-performance smart materials that can release corrosion inhibitors in response to the change in pH that accompanies the start of the corrosion process. Her research could extend the lifetime of lightweight components used in transport, which will help to create energy-efficient vehicles and support sustainable consumption of resources.