Imperial sweeps the board at national awards ceremony

Science, Engineering and Technology accolades for students and staff - News

By Danielle Reeves
27 September 2006

Students and a member of staff from Imperial College London trounced the competition at the national Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) Student of the Year Awards last week.

At the prestigious ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, three Imperial students came top in their subject category. Gabriel Keeble-Gagnere won the World Leadership Forum Award for Best Mathematics Student, whilst Marc Hull was given the IET Award for Best Information Technology Student and Andreas Kyrtatos picked up the Bentley Motors accolade for Best Mechanical Engineering Student. All three students beat off stiff competition from candidates from some of the UK's other top universities, with only one student from Oxford and two from Cambridge winning similar awards in other categories.

Imperial's success on the night did not end with these subject-specific awards. Best Mathematics Student winner, Gabriel Keeble-Gagnere, also went on to win the top GKN Award for the 2006 Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year, and a lecturer from his department, Dr Lynda White, was pronounced Lecturer of the Year 2006.

Gabriel Keeble-Gagnere graduated this summer with a first class honours degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. His Mathematics personal tutor Dr Gerald Moore said: "I'm delighted that Gabriel has received these two national awards in recognition of all the hard work he put in as a student at Imperial, and in particular for his final year Maths project on simple groups. He was a talented, conscientious student who worked extremely hard throughout his course, which was often challenging as he was balancing the workload of modules from both Mathematics and Computing, and he came into the course without having taken the Further Mathematics A Level. It's great to see his outstanding efforts rewarded at the SET awards."

Dr Lynda White added: "It's an honour and a privilege to be named Lecturer of the Year, and a real success story for Mathematics at Imperial for both myself and GabrieI to have been singled out in this way. I've been lecturing in statistics at Imperial for 35 years now and I still really enjoy the challenge of working with some of the brightest young mathematicians in the country - it's wonderful to be recognised for the work that I love doing!"

The 2006 SET awards ceremony took place on Thursday 21 September 2006 and was attended by over 500 students, academics and business leaders. Entries were received from every major university in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and judges paid tribute to the exception quality of this year's work. Forty-five students were shortlisted in fifteen different categories, which were then judged by 15 illustrious institutions including the British Computer Society, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

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