The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced the winners of the 2026 Young Engineers of the Year awards, together representing innovations in sustainable building and vehicle design, technology development for people in underserved communities and the integration of AI into manufacturing.
The five young engineers, who’ve all made significant contributions to engineering, each won a prestigious award and a £3,000 prize from the Royal Academy of Engineering to recognise their work in their respective fields. They are all winners of the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, awarded by the academy with support from the Worshipful Company of Engineers, and will receive their prizes at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on 8 July.
The 2026 Young Engineers of the Year are:
- Brogan MacDonald, head of sustainability in building structures at Ramboll UK
- Laura Tuck, research and development lead at The Washing Machine Project
- Dr Douglas Brion, co-founder and CEO of Matta
- Dr Aakeen Parikh, research manager for the Vehicle Futures Hub, Imperial College London
- Alexia Williams MBE, technical lead at Rolls-Royce
The overall winner, Brogan Macdonald, will also receive the Sir George MacFarlane Medal for her work on finding the best ways to reuse building materials such as concrete and steel in order to make the construction industry more sustainable, aiding the restoration and protection of the natural environment.
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Brogan is a leader within Ramboll’s UK Sustainability Leadership Group, helping shape its strategy for sustainable change and driving delivery of low‑carbon, resource‑efficient outcomes across the built environment. A Chartered Civil Engineer and Chartered Environmentalist, Brogan champions material reuse, embodied‑carbon reduction and regenerative design principles. Her work includes the creative retrofit and retention of the Westbury Hotel over four years, leading the technical design and project management. By auditing the existing reinforced-concrete frame and challenging the demolition brief, she enabled the reuse of the existing frame and saved 5,000 tonnes of demolition material and 3,500 tonnes of embodied carbon. Outside of work, Brogan is a strong advocate for encouraging women in STEM and sustainability, mentoring and inspiring the next generation.
At the Washing Machine Project, Laura Tuck designs manual washing machines for women and girls in underserved communities, who often carry the challenging workload of handwashing clothes. Manual washing machines have been distributed in Uganda, four machines were sent to hospitals in Gaza and more than 56,000 people have already been reached. The organisation aims to help at least a million people by 2030.
Through his company Matta, Doug Brion is giving factories the ability to autonomously sense defects, reason through root causes and ultimately optimise production in real time. Matta’s industrial AI translates this physical reality into a single, query-able intelligence platform for the entire enterprise. By turning the chaos of real-world production into structured data, Matta solves the critical bottlenecks of modern industry: rapidly bringing complex new products to market and ensuring they scale reliably without waste.
At the Vehicle Futures Hub, Dr Aakeen Parikh leads on collaborative projects, bringing together academia and industry to accelerate the deployment of future vehicle technologies. Her work supports the UK’s transition to cleaner transport by helping to turn research into practical solutions that can be adopted at scale. Her passion for developing innovative solutions to address key global issues such as climate change and social injustice inspired her work on the Minazi Impact, where she leads the development of environmentally sustainable solutions for progressing female health and well-being.
Alexia Williams is an accomplished engineering leader who has worked across the whole Rolls-Royce defence portfolio. She develops and delivers through-life technical strategies to improve the in-service performance and reliability of key assets. she organised the first ever Rolls-Royce Defence Family Open Evening in Bristol, an event that welcomed more than 1,500 employees and their families to experience the world of engineering. Through hands-on exhibits, live demonstrations, and career conversations, the event opened the possibilities of STEM to young people while deepening community engagement. Her creativity has introduced technologies such as the Laser Doppler Vibrometer to test the safety and effectiveness of new tools and technologies, and 3D-printed tooling for validation and training. These innovations have improved reliability and reduced costs for Rolls-Royce.
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‘Congratulations to this year’s Young Engineers of the Year,’ said Luke Logan FREng, chair of the academy’s awards committee. ‘By using data to shape how we build our infrastructure and make vehicles more sustainable, advocating for engineering to reach those who are underrepresented and underserved, and finding innovative ways to apply AI in the manufacturing industry, these engineers are challenging and creating new perceptions of what engineering can be and who it can help.’