This medal was commissioned by HRH The Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh KG KT, Senior Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, for exceptional contributions to engineering through practice, management or education.
Who is eligible to be nominated?
The medal is awarded biennially to an engineer of any nationality who has made an exceptional contribution to engineering as a whole through practice, management or education.
See the nomination guidelines in greater detail
Meet our 2026 winner
Professor Nasir Ahmed
The 2026 Prince Philip Medal recognizes Professor Ahmed's pioneering invention and development of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), the heart of global digital communications.
An estimated 6.8 billion smartphones with all the interactivity they provide are an integral part of daily life around the globe, keeping us connected anytime, anywhere, and used to record and play back video and audio. At the heart of smartphone technology and also that of the one billion video cameras and 1.8 billion HDTVs worldwide lies a DCT-embedded encoder. DCT is the basis for almost all image, video and audio compression standards in the world such as the JPEG standard for photos and those for MP-3 and Dolby Digital (AC-3). It is difficult to identify a technology that does not depend on it.
Originally from Bangalore in India, Nasir Ahmed moved to the United States in 1961 to study for a Masters degree at the University of New Mexico. He first proposed the revolutionary algorithm in 1972 while finishing his PhD, authoring a paper in IEEE Transactions on Computers in 1974. Before then, video transfer over networks faced a major barrier because the astoundingly high bit rates of uncompressed video required extremely high bandwidth and memory. Ahmed was the first to recognise DCT as a property of the already-existing Discrete Fourier Transform with specific applications to visual and audio signal compression.
He followed up this breakthrough by codifying its importance and promoting awareness and adoption in industry.
News about the Prince Philip Medal
Inventor of the invisible algorithm at the heart of global digital communications awarded the biennial Prince Philip Medal
Professor Nasir Ahmed, Presidential Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, is recognised for his pioneering invention and development of the Discrete Cosine Transform
Inventor of the core technology behind 4G, 5G mobile and Wi-Fi networks wins the biennial Prince Philip Medal
Dr Arogyaswami J Paulraj, Stanford University Professor and Senior Advisor for Celesta Capital, is recognized for pioneering the invention of Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology, the fo…