Alumna named in Women’s Engineering Society Top 50

The full list was officially announced at a breakfast event at the House of Lords on 23 June, International Women in Engineering Day.

The Top 50 Women in Engineering (WE50) celebrates the women across all disciplines and career stages whose work, leadership and advocacy are helping shape a more inclusive engineering profession. The 2026 Theme was Engineering Intelligence, focusing on how human creativity and technological innovation combine to solve complex challenges.

Dr Amna Riaz completed her DPhil at Mansfield College, Oxford, and is currently a Research Fellow at Northumbria University, Newcastle, where she leads the development of laser-based free-space optical communication systems for CubeSats. The research addresses one of the most significant practical challenges in laser-based space communications: keeping a narrow optical beam precisely locked on its target as the platforms carrying it move.

This work is part of ALIGN - the UK's first university-led multi-satellite optical communication programme - and has recently been further supported by a £64,000 grant from the North East Space Communications Accelerator (NESCA).

Amna says, "Engineering at Oxford gave me the foundations to think rigorously and ambitiously. My time in the Department of Engineering Science shaped not just how I approach problems, but how I see what is possible. To be recognised through the WE50 - working on laser-based optical communications for the next generation of satellites - feels like a continuation of everything that began there. I am deeply honoured".