Department announces 2025 student awards for exceptional achievements in MEng studies

Each year the Department awards student prizes for exceptional academic achievement. This year 25 outstanding undergraduate students won prizes for a range of achievements including design, academic performance, projects and lab work.

Holly Passant (Magdalen College), who graduated this year with a First Class Master’s degree in Engineering Science, was awarded the Qualcomm Prize for placing top in the year in Biomedical Engineering. She says, “These results represent four years of hard work and determination, and I’m really proud of the commitment and resilience I have shown myself. A huge thank you to everyone who has supported me - friends at Magdalen and across University of Oxford, my tutors in the Department of Engineering Science, and my project supervisor, Professor Michael Gray”.

Holly is already on to the next exciting step of her career: in June, she joined Goldman Sachs as an Equity Derivatives Sales Analyst. She says, “I’m already enjoying the challenge of developing new skills on the trading floor and working alongside a fantastic team.”

Xinying Li was awarded the Ronald Victor Janson Prize for the best project in Electronic Communications for her final year project, Distributed Near-Field Conductivity Imaging. She says, "I developed a neural network-based approach for sensing conductive objects using time-domain reflectometry of magnetoinductive (MI) waves in metamaterials with inter-element coupling. I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Prof. Ekaterina Shamonina and Prof. Chris Stevens, for their invaluable guidance and support.  This journey has been challenging, rewarding, and truly unforgettable". 

The Motz Prize for the best project in Electrical Engineering went to Gaurav Mediratta, who says, "My thesis explored a rare intersection of engineering, data science, and history – applying machine learning and statistical inference to X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectral data from the world’s largest collection of Aksumite coins. By developing a custom model to estimate elemental composition from XRF spectra, I uncovered compositional patterns across different reigns and time periods, shedding new light on a civilisation over 1,500 years old. I’m deeply thankful to Dr Paul Stavrinou and Dr George Green for their guidance and for giving me the opportunity to work alongside them on my project, and to Lincoln College, which has been my home and community throughout these four years. This has been a challenging, rewarding, and transformative journey – one that’s shaped not just my skills, but how I see the world". 

The full list of prizewinners for 2025 is:

IET Prize for outstanding academic achievement: Zaheen A-Rahman

IET Manufacturing Engineering Student Prize: Sarah MacLeod

Gibbs Prize: Best Performance in Final Honour School of Engineering Science: Liam Perreault

Gibbs Prize: Best Engineering Science project: Niall O'Sullivan

Gibbs Prize: Best Design Project: Samuel Grace, Rory Millard, Huirui Dai, Jihwan Shin, Thomas Turner

Gibbs Prize: Best performance in the Final Honour School of Engineering Science: Rory Millard

Gibbs Prize: Best performance in the FHS Eng Science - meritorious work: Anyu Shan

Gibbs Prize: Best performance in the FHS Eng Science - meritorious work: Samuel Grace

Edgell Sheppee Prize for Laboratory or Drawing Office work: Adam Thomas

Maurice Lubbock Prize for best performance in the Honour School of Engineering: Callum Inman

Edgell Sheppee Prize for excellent performance in Engineering Science: Sarah MacLeod

Qualcomm Prize for best Biomedical Engineering 4th year project: Liam Perreault

Qualcomm Prize for best overall performance in Biomedical Engineering papers: Holly Passant

Head of Department's Prize for Excellent Performance: Kelvin Li, Ellen Marsh, Joshua Pearson, Sean Graham

Maurice Lubbock Prize for best performance in the Honour School of EEM: Jack Adey

Motz Prize for Best Project in Electrical Engineering: Gaurav Mediratta

Ronald Victor Janson Prize for best project in Electronic Communications: Xinying Li

Edgell Sheppee Prize for best performance in an Engineering Project by an EEM Candidate: Edoardo Campione and Luke Vernon (equal split)

Shekhar Choubey Prize for excellence in electrical or electronic engineering: Andrei Beliaev

Head of Department's Prize for Best Engineering Science project: Zhongrui Gui, Ian Pebody, Liam Perreault