Engineering Achievement Award presented at Brunel University

This year the recipient of this highly regarded award, won in the face of strong competition from the other three finalists, was Victoria Ward for her project involving the design and development of a product that will speed up the identification of pathogens in a sample of fluid taken from a patient.

David Pike, TMD’s Operations Director said: “As a hi-tech West London based manufacturer of advanced microwave and RF products, we are proud to have sponsored the annual Brunel Engineering Celebration of Achievement Award for the last five years. The award gives student engineers the opportunity to show the results of their final year project work, and at TMD we consider that giving support to learning activity for engineering students is very important to grow the skill base and proficiency of engineering professionals for the future.”

David Pike, along with Gary Henderson, TMD’s Head of Engineering, James King, Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, and one other were given the task of judging the ‘engineering project with the most commercial potential’. They reviewed the four final projects and interviewed all four associated students before unanimously awarding the prize to Victoria Ward.

Designed to improve health care

On receiving her award Victoria explained: “It currently takes about five days to grow a culture on a Petri-dish to determine whether or not a pathogen is present, but my project results indicate that this could be reduced to about one per hour, thereby allowing clinicians to prescribe the best course of action very quickly and thus improve the quality of patient health care.”

Victoria’s project is scalable, has the prospect of considerably speeding up pathogen identification, and has the benefit of reducing costs and improving laboratory efficiency. “On TMD’s judging panel we were all very impressed with Victoria’s achievement,” summed up David Pike, “Her project shows a clear commercial potential with significant benefits for health care professionals.”