Biennial £1m engineering prize announced
22 November 2011
It was announced last week that a new prize has been founded to encourage engineering advances that create a significant benefit to humanity.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a £1m prize, which is funded by an endowment from a number of engineering companies.
Although it is not an electronics specific prize, I think electronics engineers must be in prime position to do well at the awards. Electronics plays a large part in any of the current innovations that I would describe as advancing humanity. This could include remote monitoring devices in the field of medical electronics or even playing a large part in replacing non-renewable fuels.
Recently, I attended National Instruments’ UK and Ireland Graphical System Design awards and I got a taste of some of the research being done in this country. Examples of the finalists that would definitely be included in a significant benefit to humanity scenario were an assistive joystick system for children with Cerebral Palsy, and the haptics for tumour detection system from Leeds University that was featured in November’s EPD.
The overall winner was a team from Oxford University who had developed LED glasses to assist visually impaired people (http://www.epdonthenet.net/article/43613/Bionic-glasses-for-poor-vision.aspx). These are just a couple of examples of some candidates from the UK using one piece of software.
Britain, and the British, have a reputation for not shouting about the great research and engineering done in the country, and it would be a shame if UK-based engineers didn’t feature strongly when the prize is awarded. There must be many more examples of electronics engineers advancing humanity in the UK and beyond.
The £1 million prize will be awarded in the name of The Queen to an individual or team of up to three people, of any nationality, directly responsible for advancing the positive application of engineering knowledge. The Prize will be international and will be awarded biennially, the first being presented in Spring 2013.
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