Prizes awarded for best 4th year undergraduate project posters

Overall best poster winner, Kirsty Gouck

The 2020 4th Year Project Exhibition & Competition is an amazing platform that offers 4th Year students the opportunity to showcase their work to representatives from industry, alumni and researchers/academics in the Department of Engineering Science. This year, it took place virtually on 4th June.

Based on the projects completed by all 4th year undergraduate students, students were invited to present a poster on their work to a panel of judges with the aim of winning in one of four categories or being the overall winner, with cash prizes. The overall winner also gets the opportunity to present their project at the Department of Engineering Science Jenkin Lecture as part of the Alumni Weekend in the autumn.

The 4th Year Project Poster competition has been running since 2001 and continues to provide our undergraduate students with the opportunity to write and present their first academic poster. In 2020 we received 64 poster entries and supporting summaries, which were read and assessed by our guest judges alongside the Director of Fourth Year Studies, Professor Vicente Grau.

Our judges come from a wide range of backgrounds including alumni, engineers working in industry from large corporates to spinouts and partners working in engineering.

This year’s judges were Sarah Witt (Sony Ltd), Chris Clay (System Design Engineer from Small Modular Reactors Rolls Royce) and Alex Nairac (Director at Ecrin Investments Ltd). The judges comments were highly positive:

“In terms of commentary I was personally impressed by the number of entries across a wide range of research areas and disciplines; it was also good to see students show resilience and adapt their projects in response to the lock-down from March and other setbacks. It is clear that a lot of work has gone into the projects, which is not always easy to convey on a poster.”

“There has clearly been a huge amount of work gone into the projects (and most of the posters), and great to see so many quality projects (even if the quantity made our job much harder!).”

“The standard of the posters was excellent and all of the students who entered should be proud of their projects. I am grateful to them for taking the time to share their great work with us!”

Kirsty Gouck was winner of the Overall Best Poster for her project on 'Metallic Resource Recovery from Industrial Wastewater by Polymer-Surfactant Complexation and Flocculation'. She told us,

"It was great to be able to present my project to external judges and have my research acknowledged on this platform. The competition meant that I compiled a lot of hard work from my final year which was satisfying. I think it promotes valuable interaction between students and alumni, as well as industry representatives.”

The Most Innovative Poster was awarded to Hassan Daginawalla for his work on ‘Phase Retrieval Algorithms for Direct Laser Writing of Holograms in Liquid Crystals’, "I found this topic very interesting and enjoyable and therefore wanted to use my poster as an opportunity to share my enthusiasm and the results found. I hope my poster has managed to spark more interest in this technology and encourages people to explore holography and the other work done by my team members further".

Eliza Argyropoulos’ poster on ‘Design, Build and Control of a Novel Fluidically Actuated Drone’ won the prize for Most Comprehensive Poster. She says, “Entering the poster competition was an excellent way to round off the year. I thoroughly enjoyed my 4YP [4th Year Project] so it was very satisfying to have the opportunity to present my findings in a more creative format. Winning a prize was the cherry on top of the cake. I'd like to thank my supervisor, Dr Marko Bacic, as well as James Turner and Chris Nicholls in the Osney lab for their support over the course of this year.”

Callum Coghlan won the prize for the Most Enterprising Poster for his project 'Fluid Forensics of Fossils', "It was really great fun putting this poster together and seeing the fruits of a year's worth of work on one single page! Despite the pandemic upending my project, doing this poster showed me that I had been able to forge ahead in a new direction and get some decent results. Thank you to everyone involved in organising the poster competition, and to my supervisor for all his support this year!"