Celebrating engineering: Royal Academy of Engineering awards open for nominations

Some of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s most prestigious awards and medals are now open for nominations until Wednesday 13 February.

Recognising and rewarding the very best of engineering talent, the Academy’s awards and medals celebrate the contribution engineering makes to the nation’s wealth, health and wellbeing.

The 2019 awards and medals currently open for nominations are:

• Sir George Macfarlane Medal and RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineers of the Year;
• Colin Campbell Mitchell Award for the greatest contribution to the advancement of any field of engineering;
• Rooke Award for public promotion of engineering;
• Sir Frank Whittle Medal for sustained achievement with a profound impact on engineering.

Each year five young engineers who have had an outstanding impact in their respective fields are recognised in the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, which includes a cash prize of £3,000. The overall winner will also receive the Sir George Macfarlane Medal for excellence in the early stage of their career. Last year this was won by Khouloud El Hakim, an engineer leading the development of a 40-year renewal plan for High Speed 1, a strategy to renew the operational rail system without disrupting local and international train services.

From world-leading health technologies to super-fast fibre optic networks, the Colin Campbell Mitchell Award recognises engineers who have made the greatest contribution to the advancement of any field in the profession over the prior four years. Open to both individuals and teams based in the UK, the award commemorates the life and work of one of Scotland’s most accomplished marine engineers and includes a cash prize of £3,000 for an individual or up to £6,000 for a team. Previous winners include a team of engineers from the University of Nottingham and Teledyne e2v for developing MicroHammer, a revolutionary process for extracting copper from its ore using microwave technology, as well as Professor Sriram Subramanian and the team behind Ultrahaptics, a new company developing invisible control systems constructed from ultrasound.

Engineers who promote engineering to the public are recognised by the Rooke Award. The award is normally given to an individual or small team, of no more than five, based in the UK. In 2017 the award was presented to Roma Agrawal MBE, a structural engineer who has worked on some of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Shard. Her 2018 book Built has been widely praised and she actively promotes engineering at festivals and on TV, particularly to under-represented groups.

Named after Britain’s jet engine genius, the Sir Frank Whittle Medalis awarded to an engineer resident in the UK whose sustained achievements have had a profound impact upon their engineering discipline. Last year the medal was awarded to civil engineering pioneer John Bartlett CBE FREng, who designed the UK side of the Channel Tunnel in recognition of his outstanding contributions to tunnel design and construction.

The submission deadline for all of these awards is Wednesday 13 February and all nominations must be made through the Royal Academy of Engineering’s online portal.

About Royal Academy of Engineering: As the UK’s national academy for engineering and technology, we bring together the most successful and talented engineers from academia and business – our Fellows – to advance and promote excellence in engineering for the benefit of society.

We harness their experience and expertise to provide independent advice to government, to deliver programmes that help exceptional engineering researchers and innovators realise their potential, to engage the public with engineering and to provide leadership for the profession.

We have three strategic priorities:

• Make the UK the leading nation for engineering innovation and businesses
• Address the engineering skills and diversity challenge
• Position engineering at the heart of society

We bring together engineers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics, educators and the public in pursuit of these goals.

Engineering is a global profession, so we work with partners across the world to advance engineering’s contribution to society on an international, as well as a national scale.