Alumnus Andrew Garrad joint winner of 2024 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

For over a decade, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) has been awarded to engineers whose innovations have had a significant impact on billions of lives around the world.

The 2024 Prize was awarded to Oxford Engineering alumnus Andrew Garrad CBE and Henrik Stiesdal for advancing the design, manufacture and deployment of high-performance wind turbines, allowing wind energy to make a substantial contribution to the world's electricity generation.

The QEPrize Laureates were announced at a reception on 6 February at the Science Museum attended by HRH The Princess Royal, Royal Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. They will be formally honoured at the QEPrize Presentation Ceremony, where they will receive a unique trophy, which was designed in a Create the Trophy competition by Sunil Thakkar, age 17, from India.

The QEPrize website states: "Over the last four decades, Garrad and Stiesdal have made groundbreaking engineering inputs, developing the early technology and maintaining their presence in leading positions as the industry has grown, enabling the world’s biggest rotating machines, which help drive progress towards a net-zero energy economy. Together, the work of the 2024 Laureates has contributed the technological advancements necessary to create today’s modern wind turbines operating on land and offshore. Through their innovations they have prepared technology platforms from demonstration projects to full-scale implementation, facilitating a dramatic increase in the size of individual wind turbines, the scale of the wind farms in which they are sited as well as their engineering and economic performance."

Andrew Garrad, an Honorary Fellow of New College who studied Engineering Science at Oxford in the 1970s and was awarded a CBE in 2017, pioneered the BLADED computational design tool, which enables engineers to model complicated turbine systems and predict their behaviour in advance of manufacture. The tool has been adopted all over the world, allowing the rapid expansion of global turbine manufacture. 

The Prize concludes, "The influence of these two engineers on turbine design and analysis has been groundbreaking. Their contribution is evident in most of the world’s modern wind turbines."