Royal Academy awards celebrate engineering pioneers

Amongst the winners of the academy’s annual array of trophies are Professor Dame Julia Higgins  - a senior research fellow at Imperial College London - who has received the Sir Frank Whittle Medal for her sustained excellence in designing, analysing and modifying polymer materials.

Prof Higgins is internationally recognised as one of the preeminent polymer engineers of her generation, and her work has provided some of the tools to help design processes and control properties for these difficult to mix materials.  Her work is also very relevant to the current problems of recycling plastics and why so much effort has been put into separating the different plastic materials in our waste bins.

The awards also honour the contributions made by engineers nearer the start of their careers, and this year’s Sir George Macfarlane Medal - a trophy established to celebrate just that - went to Sorin Popa, CEO of Pathfinder Medical, for the development of  a novel device that allows haemodialysis and even arterial bypasses to be performed without invasive surgery.

The awards also single out some of the UK’s most exciting and impressive engineering projects.

A team from Reaction Engines, led by Dr Helen Webber, won the Colin Campbell Mitchell Award for its successful completion of high-temperature tests of a unique precooler system for the SABRE engine project.

This technology hybrid jet/rocket engine is designed to power a single-stage fully reusable launch vehicle able to take off and land horizontally on an airfield, and could be a key breakthrough in making space travel more affordable and could also have important applications closer to Earth.

Meanwhile, the academy's Major Project Award went to the team behind the Queensferry Crossing - the 2.7 km long three-tower cable-stayed road bridge (the longest of its kind in the world) which, since it opened in 2017 has carried traffic across the Firth of Forth between Edinburgh and Fife.

A full list of this year's winners is in the box below.

Commenting on this year’s winners, the chair of the Academy’s Awards Committee Professor Raffaella Ocone said: “Engineering underpins our daily lives, and these awards acknowledge and celebrate engineers and engineering achievements that are often hidden from public view. These engineers help to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges in fields spanning medical, civil, digital, and materials, and deserve to be celebrated for the work they do.”