The Princess Royal Silver Medal, formerly the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal or "the Silver Medal", was established in 1994 by the Royal Academy of Engineering (the Academy or RAEng) to recognise outstanding and direct personal achievements and contributions to UK engineering for mid-career engineers.
The award was renamed when Princess Anne agreed to have it named in her honour, in view of her lifelong advocacy of engineering and as the Royal Fellow of the Academy. She had previously spoken of wanting to be an engineer as her career choice, in the absence of her royal duties.
Background Nominations open in early autumn with up to four medals a year awarded to outstanding engineers in their field with less than 22 years of full-time years of work in their career, so typically engineers who are in early to mid-career. Nominees must show how their contributions further the Academy's strategic goals including: a sustainable and innovative economy, improving lives with technology or supporting an engineering community fit for the future. Most crucially, nominees must demonstrate the commercial success and the overall positive impact of their work.
The first recipients of the award in 1995 were Peter Head CBE FREng, Director, G. Maunsell and Partners and Professor Martin Sweeting OBE FREng, Managing Director and CEO, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd; Professor of Satellite Engineering, University of Surrey.
Winners Year Recipient(s) Contribution2026Dr. Liucheng GuoCo-founder TG0: AI material/tactile sensing technology 2025 Alex Kendall Co-founder of Wayve; deep learning for autonomous vehicles 2025 Themis Prodromakis Work on memristors 2024 Katerina Spranger Founder of Oxford Heartbeat 2024 Daniel Jamieson Founder of Biorelate 2024 Orr Yarkoni Biological textile dyeing 2024 Jason Hallett Sustainable chemical processes 2023 Saritha Arunkumar IBM security research 2023 Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne Co-founders of Open Bionics 2023 James Roberts Neonatal incubator design 2022 Heba Bevan Founder of UtterBerry 2022 Daniel Brett and Paul Shearing Electrochemical Innovation Lab, UCL 2022 Oliver Payton Atomic force microscopy 2022 Atif Syed Electronic skin; founder of Wootzano 2021 Tom Carter Ultrasound haptics; CTO of Ultraleap 2021 Andrew Lynn Founder of Fluidic Analytics 2021 Sithamparanathan Sabesan Founder of PervasID 2020 Marko Bacic Rolls-Royce engine safety 2020 Michael Bronstein Graph deep learning 2020 Esther Rodriguez-Villegas Low-power wearable devices 2020 Jamie Shotton Machine learning for Microsoft Kinect 2019 Daniel Elford Acoustic metamaterials; CTO of Sonobex 2019 Jennifer Griffiths Founder of Snaptech 2019 Paul Newman Autonomous vehicle algorithms; founder of Oxbotica 2017 Billy Boyle Breath-biomarker diagnostics; CEO of Owlstone Medical 2017 Rob Bishop and Zehan Wang Founders of Magic Pony Technology 2017 Constantin Coussios Organ preservation 2017 David Silver Reinforcement learning; DeepMind 2016 Demis Hassabis Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind
References
External links Previous winners listed on the RAEng site