The RAEng/Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, awarded by the Royal Academy of Engineering with support from the Worshipful Company of Engineers, offers five prizes of £3,000 to early career engineers in full time higher education, research or industrial employment whose achievements are recognised as outstanding. Additionally, the Academy’s Awards Committee selects an overall winner from these five awardees who, in addition to the cash award, receives the Academy’s highly acclaimed Sir George Macfarlane Medal.

Prof Harrison Steel, Sir George McFarlane Medal winner, receiving his certificate and £3,000 from Warren East, CBE with Master Engineer Raymond Joyce. [image courtesy of Mark Witter Photography]

Professor Harrison Steel, Associate Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, leads a research group creating biotechnologies that help address challenges in biomedicine and the climate crisis, such as repurposing natural bacteria to turn waste products into biodegradable plastics.  To increase efficiency, 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.    

Harrison has been awarded the Sir George Macfarlane Medal for 2023. 

Dr Jiaqi Chu is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research.

Dr Jiaqi Chu receiving her certificate and £3,000 from Warren East, CBE with Master Engineer Raymond Joyce. [image courtesy of Mark Witter Photography]

 Jiaqi works as part of a team whose mission is to design mechanical-movement-free, high-endurance cloud storage that is both performant and cost-effective.  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, working towards energy-efficient holographic optical storage in the cloud. 

Joseph Harvey is an offshore 400kV Senior Authorised Person working for SSE Renewables.

Joseph Harvey receiving his certificate and £3,000 from Warren East, CBE with Master Engineer Raymond Joyce. [image courtesy of Mark Witter Photography]

Joseph is developing systems to improve operations and support sustainable development of the Dogger Bank Project, which will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm. He is a climate change ambassador and a keen advocate for innovation.   Joseph has been the National Grid Future Business Leader on EY’s Climate Change Business Forum and is currently a member of the UK Young Academy.    

Mihir Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Inspiritus Health and a research assistant at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford.

Mihir Sheth receiving his certificate and £3,000 from Warren East, CBE with Master Engineer Raymond Joyce. [image courtesy of Mark Witter Photography]

Mihir co-founded Inspiritus Health with a consultant anaesthetist from the NHS and set to work developing the StimSpirit device, which uses non-invasive electrical muscle stimulation to keep respiratory muscles engaged while a patient is being ventilated. Once commercialised, it could enable quicker recovery for patients and cost savings for hospitals.     

Dr Fiona Walport is a Research Fellow at Imperial College London. She is developing an accurate and efficient advanced structural design framework that helps structural engineers better optimise the use of high-performance materials to make cost savings and reduce waste.   She is a STEM ambassador, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has recently been appointed a member of the first cohort of the UK Young Academy.   

Read more about the scheme and previous winners in the Royal Academy of Engineering website.