Engineering Science DPhil graduate receives IET Dennis Hill Award

The Dennis Hill Award is an annual prize awarded to a student pursuing an MEng or MSc programme in Biomedical Engineering and related fields, such as Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Physics, Healthcare Technologies, and Health Informatics. The award recognises the student who has submitted the best individual project dissertation during the past year.

The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution. Every year, the IET chooses one outstanding final year MEng or MSc project for The Dennis Hill Award, selected from applicants across the UK in the field of biomedical engineering and related studies, to promote and acknowledge excellence in these areas of study. The In addition to a monetary prize, winners also receive a free year's membership to the IET and an invitation to present their work at the Annual Healthcare Lecture.

“Winning this award means Adedamilola is recognised as being an exceptional engineering student at a national level”.

Dami’s research project addresses glucose management in intensive care units (ICUs) using reinforcement learning. It utilised the ‘Curated Data for Describing Blood Glucose Management in the Intensive Care Unit (CINIC-IGT)’ dataset, transforming it into a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The investigation encompasses challenges such as Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) and data imbalance.

This involved a comparative analysis of several models, including Conservative Q-Learning Deep Q-Networks (CQL-DQN), to assess their potential in automating treatment recommendations, mitigating data imbalances, and providing valuable insights into dynamic treatment protocols.

Dami says of the achievement: “I feel truly blessed to have received this award. I thoroughly enjoyed working on the project and gained invaluable knowledge through the support of my professors, Professor Tingting Zhu and Zhiyao Luo, as well as my tutor and friends at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME). The unwavering support of my friends and family has been indispensable; this award is as much theirs as it is mine. I eagerly anticipate the advantages that come with IET membership and the opportunity to hear from fellow recipients during the Annual Healthcare Lecture.”

Dami’s supervisor during her studies, Professor Tingting Zhu, says of the achievement, “It is super exciting to read that Adedamilola was recognised for her excellent work on the 4th year project. Winning this award means Adedamilola is recognised as being an exceptional engineering student at a national level. Additionally, the award provides Adedamilola the opportunity to join the IET community, which will enhance her perspective as well as provide further opportunities for development.”