Freddy Sarathchandra and Lea Jung receiving the Award for enstic (GB) from HRH The Princess Royal, with Master Engineer Andrew McNaughton, at the Engineers Trust Awards Dinner on 9 June 2026

In association with

Winner 2026 (£20,000 Prize) – Freddy Sarathchandra and Lea Jung, co-founders of enstic (GB) Ltd for Automated Acoustic Mosquito Monitoring

Mosquitoes are considered the deadliest animal on the planet, not by claw or venom but by transmission. The pathogens they transfer during their bites cause more than 700,000 deaths every year through mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, Zika and yellow fever, and place roughly half the world’s population at risk of dengue alone. Tackling mosquito-borne disease is a multi-disciplinary problem spanning urban planning, novel drug development and entomology. But of particular interest here is that, whilst there are roughly 3,500 known mosquito species, only around 3% transmit disease to humans. Knowing exactly which mosquitoes are biting where, and when, is one of the most powerful levers public health teams have in mosquito-borne disease control, yet it is also the lever they can rarely pull in time.

Today, mosquito surveillance depends on physical traps, expert scientists and laboratory capacity that is often physically far from where the mosquitoes actually are. Accordingly, results on mosquito population-trends return days or weeks after the moment they were most useful. enstic was founded to close this gap. By combining engineering with entomology, they have developed a field-ready device family, anchored by their PATRICK acoustic insect monitor and LOOKA portable microscope, to automatically detect mosquitoes, confirm their species and turn wing-beat acoustics (that annoying mosquito buzz) into decision-ready mosquito impact data in near real time, without leaning on scarce laboratory infrastructure.

With the support of the Innovation for All Award, they will run two co-development deployments with established local public-health partners: one in Kenya, focused on the malaria transmitting species, and one in Sri Lanka, focused on dengue transmitting species. Their ambition is to cut the time from sampling mosquitoes to identifying the risks they pose from weeks to under 24 hours. Earlier local intelligence means better-timed and more efficient mosquito control interventions, fewer infections and less pressure on already-stretched health systems. The same enstic platform extends naturally to pollinator monitoring, agricultural pest management and biodiversity surveillance, giving the technology a sustainable path to scale well beyond these first two sites.

A charitable grant launched in 2023, made by the Worshipful Company of Engineers and UK-based charity for the most creative engineering-based solutions for the alleviation of poverty or hardship.

The Worshipful Company of Engineers Charitable Trust (the Engineers Trust) promotes the contributions of engineers to benefit society, education and research, and the relief of hardship and poverty.

Award photo courtesy of Mark Witter Photography