2017 IET Mike Sargeant Medal Winner
Dr Ozak Esu BEng PhD CEng MIET
In 2017 I received the Mike Sargeant Career Achievement Medal, awarded to an early career professional who made the most significant progress and contributions to engineering in their career over more than three years. I was nominated for the medal by my line manager at Cundall, my employer at the time, a multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy. I was working as an Electrical Engineer within the Building Services Engineering discipline at the firm.
The award raised my profile and boosted my confidence. This afforded me unique opportunities to develop my career and skills, and to volunteer to inspire young people into engineering. Since winning the award I have been the recipient of numerous other prizes, including the 2017 IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award. I have achieved professional registration as a Chartered Engineer in 2019. In 2020 I was headhunted to work for my current employer, Hilti. In 2021, I relocated from the UK to live in Switzerland, and I work at Hilti’s Corporate Research and Technology Centre in Liechtenstein, as a Technical Project Manager R&D, leading innovations in fastening applications.
2018 IET Sir Henry Royce Medal Winner
Sophie Harker MMath CEng MRAeS MIET
In 2018 I was awarded the Sir Henry Royce medal, an honour I was incredibly grateful to receive for my work as an aerodynamicist on future concept aircraft, including hypersonic air vehicles and spaceplanes. Shortly after this in 2018, I was also awarded the IET’s Young Woman Engineer of the Year award.
The IET awards gave me an amazing platform to be able to communicate about my work and my role as an engineer to an enormous audience and winning gave me the confidence to take bigger strides towards my goals. The support from the IET has been fantastic and I’ll forever be thankful for the opportunities awards like these have provided me.
Since winning the awards, I have worked on Flight Control Systems for Team Tempest, and I am currently the Assistant Chief Engineer for all of BAE Systems’ electric air vehicles, a challenging but highly rewarding role. I have also started a part time Masters degree in Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cambridge and I’m looking forward to using this learning to engineer a better world.
2019 IET Paul Fletcher Medal Winner
Thilini Wasundara
Back in 2021 I was delighted to receive the IET Paul Fletcher Award as an early career IET volunteer for my outstanding achievements in contributing to the IET. This award has motivated me and built my confidence to go further in my volunteer roles and engage with different volunteer roles within the IET, both locally and internationally, to have a positive effect on people, communities, and society. The Paul Fletcher award is the latest recognition in over eight years of my the IET volunteering journey while studying and working to engineer a better world.
Since the award I have had many invitations to speak about my career and the IET volunteering journey to inspire others to follow a similar path. I presented about the IET volunteering and recognition opportunities in a webinar I did during an IET 150 Women in Engineering Talk organised by the IET Malaysia Network. I also spoke in different On Campus forums in Sri Lanka to inspire, inform and influence the next generation of future engineers and volunteers.
I am grateful for the commitment of the IET to support and celebrate their members specially recognising the volunteers who are great assets to the IET.