AI and sustainable materials dominate Royal Academy of Engineering awards

Rob Lacey

BIOTECHNOLOGY, energy, and sustainable materials took centre stage at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s annual awards dinner, with Google DeepMind scooping the £50,000 MacRobert Award gold medal for its AI weather forecasting technology, GraphCast.

Now in its 55th year, the MacRobert Award celebrates outstanding innovation coupled with tangible societal benefit and proven commercial success.

Instead of the traditional numerical weather prediction methodologies, GraphCast uses machine learning to provide highly accurate and timely weather predictions up to ten days in advance.

By significantly improving the speed and reliability of weather predictions, GraphCast has the potential to support critical decision-making across various industries, optimise resource allocation, and help mitigate impacts of severe weather events.

The awards dinner took place in London on July 9 and saw former IChemE president Dame Judith Hackitt presented with the Academy’s President’s Medal for her “enormous contributions to chemical and systems engineering”.

As a trustee and chair of the Academy’s external affairs committee Dame Judith helped shape the organisation’s long-term strategy and fostered the launch of This is Engineering, a campaign to encourage young people to consider engineering as a career.

Early career hopefuls

Five winners were announced for the Young Engineers of the Year award, with Imperial College London researcher Alalea Kia the overall winner and recipient of the Sir George Macfarlane Medal.

Kia is the patent holder of Kiacrete, a concrete solution designed to absorb stormwater. The concrete was developed to be integrated into urban planning and reduce the amount of cement used in pavement making. Along with its recycled material use, the concrete is estimated to save at least 23t of CO2 p/km for a single carriageway road.

Kia has secured £3m in funding to scale the technology and get the product to infrastructure operators. 

Mid-career engineering achievements

AI solutions were a running theme for recipients of the mid-career prize, the Princess Royal Silver Medal.

Katerina Spranger, an Oxford PhD graduate, won the medal for her work in biotechnology. She founded the surgical startup Oxford Heartbeat, which developed PreSize, an AI-powered software that helps surgeons plan brain implant procedures. The technology raised more than £5m in government funding and is currently deployed in 12 countries.

Daniel Jamieson, the founder of pharmaceutical startup Biorelate, also took home a medal for his work in biopharmaceuticals.

Biorelate uses data science methods, including natural language processing and AI, to analyse pharmaceutical data and literature to discover disease pathways and develop new drugs. Jamieson has secured partnerships with both Pfizer and AstraZeneca to deploy the technology.

A medal was also awarded to Imperial College chemical engineering professor Jason Hallett, whose research has resulted in the spinout of seven companies. Hallett’s work involves the behaviour of ionic liquids and their use in biofuels, chemical feedstocks, and recycling.

One of Hallett’s most established startups is Lixea, a circular bioeconomy company that uses ionic liquids to fractionate wood waste for biofuel, and chemical and material production from cellulose and lignin. The company has a pilot plant in Sweden that is conducting trials to commercialise its processes.

Luke Logan, chair of the Academy’s awards committee said: “The winners of The Princess Royal Silver Medal for 2024 have each pioneered groundbreaking innovations, which they have commercialised into hugely successful businesses.

“They have made extensive contributions to engineering in the UK through the development of innovative technologies that address environmental and societal challenges.”