The Academy makes five awards of £3,000 each year to UK engineers in full-time higher education, research or industrial employment, who have demonstrated excellence in the early stage of their career (defined as less than ten years since graduation from their first degree in engineering or equivalent qualification on the day of the submission deadline).
From these five awardees, the Academy’s Awards Committee will select an overall winner who, in addition to their cash award, will receive the Academy’s Sir George Macfarlane Medal.
New for 2026: for the first time, we are inviting both nominations and self-applications for the RAEng Young Engineer of the Year award. Self-applications can be submitted by any early-career engineer who meets the eligibility criteria.
Who is eligible to be nominated?
Engineers who are eligible for the RAEng Young Engineer of the Year will satisfy the below criteria:
- An early-career engineer who received their first engineering degree (or equivalent qualification) less than 10 years before 14 October 2025.
- An engineer who has demonstrated excellence within either academia or industry.
2025 Sir George Macfarlane Medal winner
Dr Mahmoud Wagih
Founder and CEO of RX Watt, Lecturer in Implantable Electronics at University of Glasgow and Royal Academy of Engineering UK IC Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
Mahmoud is an educator, researcher and entrepreneur developing wireless power and sensing technologies that could pave the way to maintenance-free smart devices.
He is the lead researcher in the Green Radio Frequency(RF)-Enabled Electronics Lab at the University of Glasgow, with research areas that span the full breadth of sustainable electronics systems, from component-level manufacturing, to the role of radio frequency technologies in enabling more sustainable systems. Through their active projects around 120 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications have been published and over £16m has been raised in research funding from research councils, national labs, and industry partners.
He founded RX Watt, a Green RF-Enabled Electronics Lab spin-out which offers the first holistic solution for simultaneous wireless power and data transfer, with integrated sensing functionalities through their delivery of functional systems for battery-free and maintenance-free sensing systems applicable to industrial asset condition monitoring.
In addition, Mahmoud is a lecturer in Implantable Electronics, sits on several IEEE Microwave Theory & Techniques, Sensors, and Power Electronics technical committees, is a Topic Editor for both the Royal Society and IEEE research journals and a consultant for multiple organisations on radio frequency/microwave design and testing.
2025 RAEng Young Engineers of the Year
Jack Biltcliffe
R&D Lead, The Washing Machine Project
Jack started his engineering career at Dyson and Elvie, before joining the Washing Machine Project, which manufactures hand-cranked washing machines for use in the developing world.
Jack has travelled to Uganda and Kenya to distribute machines and get feedback from users and then improved designs for performance and reliability. He used his previous experience at Dyson and Elvie to optimise design workflows and collaboration and has applied innovative CAD systems to dramatically increase production, from tens to thousands of units.
At Dyson he founded a sustainability team to develop Life Cycle Assessments and guide product sustainability strategies. At Elvie, he helped redesign wireless breast pumps for the US insurance market to make them more accessible and cost-effective.
Andrei Feraru
Founder and CEO of Feraru Dynamics Ltd
Andrei Feraru has developed and commercialised advanced wearable technology that has protected nearly 1,000 workers from hazardous vibrations exposure that lead to Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS). His approach has even led the Health and Safety Executive to change their guidance on how HAV exposure can be measured, creating lasting benefits to worker well-being and efficiency.
He got the idea for the technology during a placement at Rolls-Royce Aerospace and devised a vibration health monitoring device, which became the foundation of Feraru Dynamics, the company he founded before graduating. His invention is patented in the UK, USA, Canada and Europe and has attracted £1 million in private equity investment, and his company has expanded to Canada and the USA. His innovative approach has led to multiple awards, from the British Safety Industry Federation Innovation Award to Highways England “Big Idea” Award.
Miguel Martinez-Paneda
Principal Structural Engineer, Arup
Miguel is an expert in structural dynamics, earthquake and wind engineering and has worked for two of the UK’s top design firms: Foster & Partners and Arup. His path to becoming a structural engineer was unusual in that his first degree was in Architecture. That hasn’t hindered him from winning numerous design competitions and creating prize-winning designs for a series of iconic tall buildings around the world.
He has made innovative contributions to research that have led to the development of a new damper design for super tall buildings that uses part of their own mass to dampen their movement and is awaiting patent approval. He has also convened academics from within the disciplines of Civil Engineering and Aeronautics with practitioners from industry to consider these new approaches to the design of tall buildings.
Dr Calvin Tsay
Associate Professor, Department of Computing, Imperial College London
Calvin is a leading interdisciplinary engineer at Imperial College, building new computing tools in optimisation and machine learning. He is deploying these tools to tackle large-scale problems in energy systems and sustainability.
He leads an independent research group that contributes industrially relevant research such as OMLT, an award-winning open-source software, and tools for green hydrogen system design. He has authored 50 peer-reviewed publications and collaborated with industry on energy flexibility and AI security and privacy.
Calvin is an exceptional ambassador for engineering education, lecturing in the Girls Who ML programme and volunteering with the Great Exhibition Road Festival.
Awardees from across the years
News about the RAEng Young Engineer of the Year awards
Green wireless charging whizz wins top Academy award
Electronics lecturer and entrepreneur Dr Mahmoud Wagih has won one of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s top awards for his work developing wireless power and sensing technologies that could pave the…
Royal Academy of Engineering names outstanding Young Engineers of the Year
Achievements include a permeable concrete that mitigates flooding risk through to a surgical device that enables safer hip replacements.