Set for success – students win prestigious awards

Imperial undergraduates flourish in final of SET Awards - News

Thursday 27 September 2007
By Naomi Weston

Two Imperial undergraduates have won awards at the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards for their projects in electrical engineering and mathematics. The awards ceremony was held on Thursday 20 September.

Supported by British Industry, and Britain's leading scientific and technical institutions, the SET awards are multidisciplinary to reflect the wide range of degrees universities have to offer.

Lecturers nominated students for the awards by submitting a citation describing their student’s course and achievements. Students then had to write a synopsis of their individual projects for submission.

Richard Hayden, from Imperial’s joint mathematics and computing degree programme, won the Microsoft Research Award for the Best Computational Science Student which is judged by the British Computer Society. His project focused on how performance of large clusters of computers can be modelled and improved. This would, for example, allow companies such as, Microsoft, Google and IBM, to better predict how changes in design will affect the overall speed and quality of their search engine results.

Dr Jeremy Bradley, from the Department of Computing, commented on Richard’s achievement: "As his supervisor, I am absolutely delighted that Richard's hard work and achievement have been rewarded in this way. Richard demonstrated both insight and tenacity to produce genuinely impressive research in the field of computational science."

From the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Stephen Motley, won the e2v Technologies Award for the Best Electronic Engineering Student. His project is focused on a Portable Endoscopy Training Simulator for looking inside the human body using minimally invasive surgery.

In addition, Jason Galazidis, from the Department of Mathematics, was shortlisted for the Laing O'Rourke Award for the Best Mathematics Student for his project entitled: On a construction of a strongly regular graph from the Hexacode with parameters as of the Hall-Janko graph.

Namrata Ghelani, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was shortlisted for the Balfour Beatty Award for the Best Civil Engineering Student, judged by the Institution of Civil Engineers. Her project is entitled Investigation into the structural behaviour of stainless steel elliptical hollow sections.

The awards are organised by the World Leadership Forum, a not-for-profit non-governmental organisation which promotes leadership, and take place on an annual basis.