Nominations are now open for the 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
The £500,000 prize is the world’s most prestigious engineering accolade, awarded to up to ten engineers responsible for a bold, groundbreaking engineering innovation of global benefit to humanity.
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The QEPrize celebrates the critical role that engineering plays across society and honours the engineers who’ve changed the world through their work. Nominations are open to all engineers who embody this spirit of innovation – across all sectors of engineering and wherever they practise.
Previous QEPrize laureates include:
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● Dr Bill Dally, Dr Fei-Fei Li, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Jensen Huang, Professor John Hopfield, Dr Yann LeCun and Professor Yoshua Bengio for modern machine learning, 2025
● Andrew Garrad CBE and Henrik Stiesdal for modern wind power technology, 2024
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● Professor Martin Green, Professor Andrew Blakers, Dr Aihua Wang and Dr Jianhua Zhao for PERC solar photovoltaic technology, 2023
● Dr Masato Sagawa for the sintered neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnet, 2022
● Professor Isamu Akasaki, Professor Shuji Nakamura, Professor Nick Holonyak Jr, Dr M George Craford and Professor Russell Dupuis for LED lighting, 2021
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● Hugo Fruehauf, Dr Bradford Parkinson, Richard Schwartz and Professor James Spilker for the Global Positioning System, 2019.
The particular focus this year is on attracting a diverse range of nominations – both in terms of the areas of engineering covered by the nominated innovations, and among the nominated engineers themselves. The only limitations are that self-nomination and posthumous nomination aren’t allowed.
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You can celebrate the engineers who change our world by making your nomination here.
Nominations close on 27 June.