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.

The 2024 Young Engineers of the Year are:

Dr Alalea Kia, Associate Research Fellow, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Royal Academy of Engineering Associate Research Fellow, Imperial College London

Alalea has developed a patented concrete pavement called Kiacrete. This permeable solution will help to alleviate climate change and urbanisation challenges by absorbing stormwater, mitigating the devastating impact of urban flooding. Her new climate change resilient permeable pavement has an engineered pore structure that significantly reduces the amount of cementitious material used in concrete pavements, which along with its recycled material use, results in a saving of at least 23 tonnes of CO2 per km for a single carriageway road.

The Master Engineer & 2024 Sir George MacFarlane Medal Winner Dr Alalea Kia
The Master Engineer & 2024 Sir George MacFarlane Medal Winner Dr Alalea Kia (photo credit Rob Lacey)

As the overall winner, Alalea also received the Sir George Macfarlane Medal.

Dr Ruben Doyle, CEO of Additive Instruments Ltd

Ruben invented and commercialised a surgical impactor device designed for use in orthopaedic surgery. By ensuring appropriate bone preparation and implant seating, Ruben’s patented device minimises the risk of bone fracture during hip replacements, speeds up surgeries and reduces the incidence of repetitive strain injury for surgeons.

Dr Ishara Dharmasena, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at Loughborough University

Ishara is a world-leading theorist in the field of nanogenerators whose ‘distance-dependent electric field’ theory has revolutionised practices in the development of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG). His work has been pivotal in bringing nanogenerators from a theoretical to a practical state.

Jamie Serjeant, Senior Design Engineer at Occuity

Jamie led the development of Occuity’s AX1 axial length meter, which has the potential to transform the way we manage myopia, a leading cause of vision loss. The AX1 enables quick, non-invasive measurement of eyeball length, providing accurate, quantitative monitoring of myopia, which is key to effective clinical intervention.

Nikhila Ravi, Research Engineering Manager at Meta

Nikhila leads an AI Research Engineering team focused on computer vision research in Meta’s Fundamental AI Research group (FAIR). She co-led the open source Segment Anything project, including the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a universal segmentation model with zero shot generalisation to unseen objects and images, and the Segment Anything 1 Billion dataset (SA-1B), the largest of its kind.

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

The Master Engineer & 2024 RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineers [L-R Dr Ishara Dharmasena, Nikhila Ravi, Dr Dolores Byrne OBE, Dr Alalea Kia, Dr Ruben Doyle, Jamie Serjeant] (photo credit Rob Lacey)
The Master Engineer & 2024 RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineers [L-R Dr Ishara Dharmasena, Nikhila Ravi, Dr Dolores Byrne OBE, Dr Alalea Kia, Dr Ruben Doyle, Jamie Serjeant] (photo credit Rob Lacey)