The RAEng/Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, awarded by the Royal Academy of Engineering and funded by 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 receives the Academy’s Sir George Macfarlane Medal.

Pictured above is Dr Alalea Kia on 3 June 2025 receiving her certificate from Dr Shini Somara with Master Engineer Eur Ing Penny Taylor, JP and the Clerk [photo courtesy of Mark Witter Photography] 

Dr Alalea Kia is an Advanced 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 permeable pavement results in a saving of at least 23 tonnes of CO₂ per km for a single carriageway road. Alalea has developed her research idea into a real-world, proven system, and demonstrated its excellent long-term drainage and durability in a field site at Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus.

Kiacrete has the potential to be used across the built environment, from footpaths to airports, to reduce standing water, improve transport safety and to help achieve net zero carbon emissions. Alalea has secured in excess of £3 million in funding to further develop her pavement technology, and there is great interest in the adoption of her pavement technology.  Alalea is the winner of the Sir George Macfarlane Medal.

Alalea was also the winner of the Engineers Trust Hawley Award 2022

Dr Ruben Doyle, CEO of Additive Instruments Ltd

Ruben receiving his Award on 3rd June 2025 from Dr Shini Somara with Master Engineer Eur Ing Penny Taylor, JP and the Clerk [photo courtesy of Mark Witter Photography] 

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.  After patenting his invention, Ruben founded Additive Instruments Ltd and became its CEO, raising funding to grow the company and developing a fully functional verification prototype – a handheld, battery-powered impactor tool that benefits patients by reducing fracture risk, and benefits surgeons by reducing risk of injury.

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

Ishara receiving his Award on 3rd June 2025 from Dr Shini Somara with Master Engineer Eur Ing Penny Taylor, JP and the Clerk [photo courtesy of Mark Witter Photography] 

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.  His latest research is focused on ‘super-smart textiles’ that use TENG technology to convert body movements into electrical signals. These self-powered sensors will be able to monitor body movements and physiological parameters, providing a low-cost at-home solution that addresses the urgent global need for remote rehabilitation care. Ishara has demonstrated the potential of this technology with recent prototypes, and is currently working with the UK National Rehabilitation Centre and the textile industry to scale up and expand his work.

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.  Jamie has a proven track record of turning early-stage prototypes into impactful commercial products. In a previous role at Occuity, he led the mechanical development of the PM1, a handheld non-contacting pachymeter that was developed to diagnose glaucoma without using ultrasound methods that require physical contact with the eye. Earlier in his career at Dyson, Jamie developed the user interface of Dyson Zone, a personal purifier integrated into noise-cancelling headphones, overcoming numerous engineering challenges while developing the technology.

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. She co-led an open-source segmentation project to give the ability to identify the pixels within an image that belong to a specific object of interest, and is an important task in many real-world applications, from photo editing to radiology scans.  Previously, building AI segmentation systems required the creation of custom datasets and training models with them, which was costly and required AI expertise. The segmentation model that has been developed can be applied to a wide variety of use cases out of the box via prompting, similar to the way that large language models like ChatGPT can perform a range of tasks without requiring custom data or expensive adaptations.  In her approximately 7-year tenure at Meta, Nikhila has earned a worldwide recognition as a top researcher.

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

The Worshipful Company of Engineers Charitable Trust (the Engineers Trust) acknowledges excellence in engineering, supports engineering education and research, gives grants and assists in the relief of hardship and poverty.