EW BrightSparks 2019 - Top 30 Electronic Engineers Under 30

For the third consecutive year, RS Components and Electronics Weekly have once again joined forces to find and celebrate the new generation of electronic engineers, with a panel of judges selecting the top 30 engineers under the age of 30 in the UK.

The successful nominees were chosen by a judging panel from across the UK electronics industry, including: Steph McGovern (Journalist and TV Presenter), Clive Couldwell (group editor, Electronics Weekly), Graham Curren (CEO, Sondrel), Paul Hide (techUK’s director of market engagement and membership), David Lakin (IET’s Head of Education, 5-19), Isabella Mascarenhas (VP Grass Roots & Shining Stars, RS Components), Adam Rees-Leonard (UK Naval Engineering Science & Technology (NEST) – Chair of Science & Technology), Lindsley Ruth (CEO, RS Components) and Lizzie Truett (IET’s Young Professionals Engagement Manager).

DesignSpark is proud to announce the top 30 electronics engineers under 30 with the future of engineering in their hands, who have received their awards at the IET HQ in London.

Congratulations to the EW BrightSparks Class of 2019!

Victoria Aviomoh

Telecommunications Design Engineer, Arup

As the key telecoms designer at Arup on the Great Western Mainline Electrification project, she was responsible for ensuring adequate GSM-R signal levels were maintained in tunnels along the route.

As a STEM ambassador, she volunteers to represent Arup at High School career fairs and events where she talks to students, parents and carers about her work as an engineer.

Dr Alex Beasley

Hardware Engineer, Pico Technology

He designed, developed and implemented the FPGA architecture for a new PicoScope product. It was an externally funded, internationally collaborative research project integrating future generation technology.

In 2017 he ran a widening participation summer school at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bath, supporting 12 students from less advantaged backgrounds.

Kerris Boulton

Apprentice Electronics Specialist Support Technician, The University of Manchester

She represented The University of Manchester’s Technical Apprenticeship Programme as its sole electronics apprentice in the WorldSkills UK 2018 Industrial Electronics Competition, winning a Silver Medal.

She is a STEM Ambassador, working with local schools, colleges and teachers to encourage young people to choose STEM related subjects and realise these are valid career options.

Kisha Bradley

Founder #girlswithdrills and Brightbox Maker Space

From scratch, she set up Brightbox Maker Space, which brings STEM to disadvantaged communities with a mobile makerspace and free activities. They create playful learning environments where children can play with technology.

She has hosted a #girlswithdrills live Facebook event with RS Components, ran workshops at a New Scientist exhibition and has attended and spoken at numerous STEM events across the country.

Lewis Baldry

TV Degree Apprentice, British Telecom

He led a BT project on the transition of ITV’s dedicated media network (Xnet) onto a new monitoring system, which enhances BT’s ability to detect and diagnose faults in the network and improve customer experience.

For volunteering activities he has contributed to Computing/EdTech events to promote coding, hosting work experience days at BT, explaining to students how apprenticeship schemes work and running career stands at events.

Shawn Brown

Presenter & Inventor, Kids Invent Stuff

He co-presents Kids Invent Stuff, the YouTube channel where school kids get the chance to have their ideas built on camera. He builds a different invention every month, for example a sneeze-activated flamethrower!

In 2016 he helped build the Man Engine an 11m tall giant mechanical tin miner, a huge collaborative engineering project that culminated in a tour around the country seen by tens of thousands of people.

Emma Curati-Alasonatti

Engineer, Arm

Now at Arm, a graduate project focused on hardware vulnerabilities caused by speculation, examining various cache side-channel attacks and implementing detections and she wrote attack benchmarks for testing detection systems.

She volunteers at primary schools to run after school code clubs for Key Stage 2 pupils, and through the UK Electronics Skills Foundation, being a former scholar herself, she mentors current scholars.

Craig Dickson

Aerospace Engineering Graduate, BAE Systems

Working at BAE Systems, his Master’s thesis describes the theoretical analysis and optimisation of a forced convection heat exchanger, winning the IMechE medal for best overall final year project.

In his day job he has a double hatted role. Primarily working as a design engineer he also doubles as the Strathclyde University Strategic Partnership Lead, discussing opportunities for students at Universities and in BAE Systems.

Maisie Edwards-Mowforth

Team HYPED’s Static Technical Team Head, The University of Edinburgh

She lead a team of University of Edinburgh undergraduate engineers in the simulation, design, testing, procurement and manufacture of Team HYPED’s Hyperloop Pod Chassis, for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition Finals.

Carbon fiber is a complex material to design for and work with, and she handled all the logistics of transporting the components to their industrial partner over 50 miles away, making sure all the timings came together.

Joe Gibson

Student, University of Strathclyde

At the University of Strathclyde, he won the UK STEM Awards in 2017, competing in the Defence Technology category where the challenge involved designing an aircraft carrier for the year 2050.

Every year he judges and mentors a local school heat of the Teen Tech competition where students present their ideas to a panel of 3 judges in a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style competition for the London final.

Ryan Gilmour

Student, University of Edinburgh

As president of Engineering For Change at Edinburgh University he arranged a Missing Maps “Mapathon” with the NUS Red Cross Student Chapter, teaching 30 people digital mapping techniques. These maps are now used for humanitarian aid.

He also set-up the student-led project “Winds of Change” building an off-grid 1kW wind turbine in rural Edinburgh for use by a community group. He also writes for the university “Teaching Matters” blog and podcast.

Shoubhik Gupta

PhD Student, The University of Glasgow

He did his PhD in high-performance bendable tactile sensors, during which he developed mechanically flexible silicon-based devices and integrated them with piezoelectric transducer layer.

During the PhD, as a Marie Curie fellow, he was involved in European Researchers’ Nights and demonstrated group activities to community members at the science museums, showcasing interactive prototypes.

Benjamin Harris

Thermofluids Engineer, Rolls-Royce

Working at Rolls Royce as a Thermofluids Engineer (Nuclear Propulsion Systems) he achieved massive cost savings for a client through the development and implementation of a novel and industry leading Plant Performance Monitoring programme.

He regularly takes part in STEM Outreach programmes being a STEM Teacher for underperforming and disadvantaged children from Derby 6th form schools, and also in his position as an aspiring officer within the Royal Navy Reserves.

Niall Holmes

PhD Student, University of Nottingham

The main focus of his study is developing hardware and equipment to facilitate a new type of wearable functional brain imaging system allowing subjects to move around while brain activity is recorded.

The system is a new type of magnetoencephalography device that uses quantum sensors to non-invasively measure the magnetic fields generated by the brain. It’s being used in subjects who make unpredictable movements, i.e. as children as young as two.

Scott Lorimer

Graduate Naval Architect, BAE Systems Naval Ships

He has helped create a Floating Capture Device that would be used to capture unmanned rigid-hulled inflatable boats at sea. This was part of a contract involving many industry partners as well as the UK, Dutch and Australian MoDs.

As a STEM Ambassador, he attends career fairs representing BAE Systems, promoting the company’s apprenticeship scheme to secondary school children of all ages.

Elizabeth Maclennan

Project Manager, McMurtry Automotive / University of Bath

She was the Project Manager of Team Bath Racing Electric (TBRe), the UK’s number one electric team, and had overall responsibility for the team that designed and built the 2018 car. Comprised of approximately 40 students, from across three different degree disciplines.

For STEM activities TBRe regularly hosted open days and invited local school students to come and learn about engineering. She also worked with the Department of Development and Alumni Relations to foster stronger links with the wider community.

Stewart Macpherson

Electronics Engineer, Thales

Some of the electronics he has designed and produced are currently in use on submarines, aircraft, armoured vehicles and handheld imagers. He is also An active STEM ambassador alongside being a panel member for Children’s Hearings Scotland.

He worked on electronics design, development, integration and qualification of a thermal imaging system upgrade to a fleet of Main Battle Tanks for a major European client, providing a step change in imaging quality to the personnel operating on the platform.

Liat Moss

Steam Director, Jewish Interactive

She currently works in STEM education running events and workshops to get students, especially other girls, involved in STEM subjects, running hackathons for primary and secondary students and volunteering at Raspberry Pi Jams and Coder Dojos.

Her achievements include the LED earrings which she designed, soldered and coded. They were created with the Adafruit Gemma M0 and a neopixel ring and coded with CircuitPython. She has also worked with micro:bits.

Ben Nagy

Software and Big Data Team Lead, Jaguar Land Rover

The JLR Driven team, for which he led the electrical subsystem design and delivery, participates in a series of race events organised by the Greenpower Education Trust. These race events are targeted mainly at secondary school and sixth form students.

He developed a driver information system (“cluster”) for a battery-powered go-kart using an Android smartphone and an Arduino. The Arduino controls the electric motor based on driver input and reads in sensor information, such as battery voltage, current draw, vehicle speed etc.

Emma Nolan

Apprentice Software Engineer, Thales

She has been working in R&D with the opportunity to attend Future NEST workshops and to contribute ideas for future concepts in the navy and network with other graduates/apprentices across the country.

She is also a STEM ambassador with her local hub being the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Events supported include being a mentor at Hack-Manchester and careers talks for sixth formers studying STEM subjects.

Sophie Paveling

Multi-Skilled Shift Technician, Coca Cola European Partners

A Multi-Skilled Shift Technician at Coca Cola, she has worked on numerous energy and water saving projects. She also designed and implemented a layer pad alarm system on a production line that saves £16,000 every shift.

She is an ambassador of a number of organisations encouraging young people and women to take the apprenticeship route: YAAN (Young Apprentice Ambassador Network), Appetite4Engineering and Action4Youth.

Nathan Ruttley

Electronic Engineer, RPD International

He was the project lead for a Smart Home Radiator Valve designed to save users energy and money, working on behalf of a UK customer to turn their early stage prototype into a manufacturable and marketable product.

Alongside the client’s engineering team he helped to integrate the firmware and hardware which also involved creating the specification for the client’s test firmware. He then designed the electronic testing and provisioning equipment for the factory production line.

Kate Self

TV & Digital Media Apprentice, British Telecom

She worked on Premier League Productions and the UEFA Champions League as an implementation engineer, staging and configuring the equipment and sometimes installing it at the grounds, into the flight cabinet she had provided.

She has worked as a mentor for students, become an ambassador for Women in Technology, volunteered at numerous charity events and helped with a CodeClub, attending a school weekly to teach students basic coding.

Max Simmonds

Senior Electronics Engineering Specialist, Safran

He won an international space apps challenge, increasing the functionality of an orbiting satellite – ArduSat. The prototype built used an Arduino, camera, and Raspberry Pi for lunar tracking/system monitoring.

He has also designed and built a 3D printer from scratch, developed a musical tesla coil modulated to play music (StarWars) and developed an electric, self-balancing unicycle for his 3rd year university project.

Louisa Smith

Leading Hardware Engineer, Imagination Technologies

She was responsible for the verification environment for a complex module that controls scheduling and manages resources in the GPU and also contains a MCU, improving the verification code and documentation and stadardising the methodology, which reduced the required number of testbenches from forty-nine to just two.

At university she helped start the Robogals Southampton chapter. She also helped with a Headstart course run jointly by the University of Southampton and the UKESF and has supported several events in local secondary schools.

Ryan Smith

Electronic Engineer, Science and Technology Facilities Council

At university he was awarded “Best final year project” for his Semi Autonomous Robotic Platform, a system that could replace the centralised design of most robots with a modular system using a standardised set of commands.

He has been doing STEM outreach since sixth form when he ran a STEM club, participating in First Lego League and Scalextrics competitions. During university he was a subject specific student ambassador for Robotics.

Giovanni Sobrero

Aftermarket Supply Chain Lead, Rolls-Royce

As a systems engineer in the fuel and actuation sub system design modelling team, he was responsible for the modelling of a demonstrator project for Rolls-Royce Bristol. He has also lead responsibilities for disposing of old manufacturing machines for a site-moving project, achieving a significant profit in the process.

He was appointed STEM Leader for the early careers community at Rolls-Royce, which involves co-ordinating, setting up and supporting every STEM event in the West-Midlands area on behalf of Rolls-Royce.

Ricki Tura

Placement Engineer, UltraSoC / University of Southampton

In 2018, he won TechWorks’s UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) Scholar of the Year and was sponsored by UltraSoC. His document generating tool creates formatted DOCX tables from multiple XML sources to reduce the amount of errors in IP documentation.

He is described as an integral part of Southampton University’s 2,000 strong Electronics and Computer Science Society for which he was elected president. The society has since seen a two-fold increase in participation at industry partner events.

Ciaran Walsh

Field Sales Engineer, Analog Devices

He led an Analog Devices customer account team which gained a design win for an RF transceiver. As field sales engineer in charge of the account, he analysed and interpreted the customer’s design requirements and provided technical advice to optimise the system architecture. He won “Rising Star – New Engineer of the Year” at the 2018 Elektra Awards.

He has worked as a robotics tutor with Colmac Robotics, travelling to schools throughout Ireland, has supported the work of the start-up community Hardware Pioneers and is a mentor for start-ups at PanaceaStars, a start-up accelerator in Oxford.

Richard Wereski

Electrical Engineer, BAE Systems

While on international secondment in France, he was responsible for trying to qualify a new novel piece of kit known as a fuse setter, electronically programming. He was responsible for defining environmental trials for the fuse setter that included, resin testing, sand and dust spray, vibration trials and contamination by fluids.

An active STEM ambassador, he supports a Glasgow Skills Camp at BAE Systems Glasgow shipyards, has participated in the Schools Engineering Challenge, organised a 3-day course at Lancaster University for young people and is an active IET young buddy.