On Tuesday 13 July, the Academy hosted an event to celebrate our 2021 Awards winners. This was our first in-person event since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns and restrictions that followed.
Celebration of engineering excellence is at the heart of the Royal Academy of Engineering's work, and the Academy President Sir Jim McDonald FREng FRSE introduced the awards which seek to recognise and reward the very best of engineering talent whose achievements have a huge impact on society.
Our Royal Fellow, Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, presented the 2021 MacRobert Award gold medal, and our Silver Medals winners and the recipients of the Rooke Award and Major Project Award also received their medals at the event.
The Rooke Award
Dr Larissa Suzuki was presented with the Rooke Award for public promotion of engineering. Dr Suzuki is a technologist, entrepreneur and engineer who is now Data and AI Practice Lead at Google Cloud. She is working with Vint Cerf to develop the Interplanetary Internet, as well as leading on sustainability and smart cities.
Read more about our Rooke Award winner
The Major Project Award
Executive Vice President of Innovation and Engineering at bp, David Eyton CBE FREng, presented the Major Project Award to the team behind the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak Upgrade (MAST-U), the UK’s national fusion experiment based in UKAEA’s Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire. The machine has the potential to provide a cheaper, more efficient means of providing energy, vital to the development of commercial power from nuclear fusion.
Read more about our Major Project Award winner
The Silver Medals
Our three Silver Medallists are all early to mid-career engineers who have made an outstanding contribution to the UK profession.
Dr Tom Carter is Chief Technology Officer at Ultraleap, and has invented a technology that uses ultrasound to create tactile sensations on bare hands. Sound waves from a collection of small ultrasonic speakers are focused onto the user’s hands, causing the skin to vibrate and create the sensation of touch.
Dr Andrew Lynn is CEO of Fluidic Analytics and has led the company’s progression from a promising idea, through product development, to producing research and diagnostic products for characterising protein interactions. Two of these products have been launched commercially and one has made fundamental contributions to understanding the action of drugs for Alzheimer’s Disease.
Dr Sithamparanathan Sabesan is CEO of PervasID Ltd and his work in battery-free radio frequency identification (RFID) tag tracking has been internationally recognised. As founder and CEO, Dr Sabesan has successfully grown PervasID into a global enterprise, providing the world’s most accurate passive RFID readers.
Read more about our Silver Medal winners
The MacRobert Award
Our Royal Fellow, Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, presented the MacRobert Award to winners DnaNudge. The London start-up was honoured for the development of its pioneering consumer genetics technology, pivoting and adapting the technology to deliver a rapid, lab-free RT-PCR COVID-19 test to NHS hospitals.
The MacRobert Award, supported by the Worshipful Company of Engineers, is the most presitigious and longest-running prize for engineering innovation in the UK. Finalists Creo Medical and PragmatIC were also recognised at the event.
The 2021 MacRobert Award for engineering innovation
Before the event, the Academy announced the winners of the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineers of the Year and awarded the Prince Philip Medal to Dr Gladys West. Read more about our 2021 Awards winners here.
Thank you to our sponsor
The Awards Celebration was made possible thanks to support of our headline sponsor, bp. Early in the evening, the audience heard from David Eyton CBE FREng, Executive Vice President of Innovation and Engineering at bp, who also announced and presented the Major Project Award.
Sponsored by
-
bp