Read more about the winners of the E&T Innovation Awards 2021

Winning the top prize, Esther Ngumbi was named the E&T Difference Maker of the Year, for her outstanding and inspiring work as a researcher, author, public servant, entrepreneur, and educator.

Born in a rural farming community along the Kenyan Coast, Esther studied hard at school with the drive to rescue her family and community from poverty and to be a role model to many young African girls.

Despite the notion that education for girls was unimportant where she lived, Esther gained her doctorate degree in Entomology from Auburn University – becoming the first woman in her community to obtain a Ph.D. degree.

In 2012, Esther and her parents founded the Dr. Ndumi Faulu Academy, a school for children in Kenya, and in 2014, she created Oyeska Greens, a startup that teaches smallholder farmers in and around her community how to use updated technologies and methods in agriculture.

Other innovations that won prizes at this year’s awards included the first functional dengue fever early warning system and a laser-based sensor that can help to diagnose heart and lung disease.

Now in its seventeenth year, the E&T Innovation Awards are the ultimate celebration for people, projects, and organisations that are revolutionising our world through excellence in engineering and technology.

This year’s Awards, hosted by Fran Scott, included a range of new categories to reflect the societal challenges that rely on engineers and technologists for their solutions.

The 2021 E&T Innovation Award winners are:

• Difference Maker of the Year: Esther Ngumbi
• Digital Health and Social Care: HR Wallingford for the D-MOSS Dengue Fever Early Warning System: Using Satellite Earth Observations & Machine Learning to Forecast Dengue Fever
• Future Power and Energy: Tsinghua University for Large capacity DC breaking technology
• Communications and IT: University of Aeronautics and Astronautics for AerialRadioOverseer – an AI-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle radio monitoring system
• Manufacturing 4.0: Cambridge Precision Limited for Cobotic Hub
• Sustainability and Climate Change: Innovyze and Fairfield Control Systems for Building a Sustainable Future - Glasgow's Smart Canal
• Protecting Society and Saving Lives: Stantec, Thames Water, The London Fire Brigade for the London Fire Flow, a system for water suppliers and fire services to be able to calculate the firefighting capacity of a water supply system and buildings’ fire flow requirements
• Cyber Security: Crypto Quantique for harnessing quantum tunnelling delivers the ultimate security for IoT devices
• R&D: Element Six Global Innovation Centre for DNV-B1™, the world’s first widely available quantum diamond grade optimised for a wide range of quantum applications
• Tech for Good: HR Wallingford for the D-MOSS Dengue Fever Early Warning System: Using Satellite Earth Observations & Machine Learning to Forecast Dengue Fever
• Smarter World: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics for AerialRadioOverseer – an AI-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle radio monitoring system
• Future Mobility: Furrer+Frey GB Limited for rapid battery chargers to power up a very light rail revolution & create sustainable transport options for smaller towns
• Intelligent Systems: Roke for STARTLE® for Maritime (S4M) – designed to assist the Royal Navy in understanding the evolving Situational Awareness (SA) picture around a ship
• Future Unicorn: Donisi Health for contact-free bio-sensing and diagnosis
• Diversity, Equality & Inclusion: SpaceML for SpaceML Worldview Search: Distributed Open-source Research with Citizen Scientists for the Advancement of Space Technology for NASA
• Trust & Truth: Seldon for Seldon Albi – an open-source Python library designed to offer clear unbiased insights into the workings of machine learning models, ensuring decisions are accurate and ethical
• Young Pioneer: Young Pioneer: Shafae Ali, Alfie Mcmeeking, Andy Ferdinand, Premal Gadhia, and Judith Weill from Imperial College London for their project to make the footwear industry sustainable through AR digital skins and 3D-printed biodegradable self-healing technology

The E&T Awards are sponsored by MathWorks, Arrow Electronics, Emerson, GCHQ, and National Grid.