Student Patents, Prizes, Awards and Scholarships
Please find below a selection of patents, prizes, awards and scholarships achieved by the Sensor CDT students.
Patents
Farah Alimagham, Tanya Hutter, Keri Carpenter and Peter Hutchinson, Detector assembly and method. Patent pending.
Josie Hughes, Developing an automated lettuce harvester system with farming companies utilising soft robotics to enable safe and reliable harvesting of produce. Patent pending.
Sammy Mahdi, Alexander Patto, Nalin Patel, Tianheng Zhao, Richard Bowman, Cartridge for use in analysis of liquids,GB1821062.5 (December 2019).
Pelumi Oluwasanya, Luigi Occhipinti (through Cambridge Enterprise), Particulate Matter Detection, Ref: Occ-3445-17-02 [MJN/CP7393747], PCT/EP2018/075234(September 2018)
Pelumi Oluwasanya, Luigi Occhipinti, Particulate Matter Detection, Ref: Occ-3445-17 [MJN/CP7293814], GB1715014.5 (September 2017).
Henning Sirringhaus, Jerome Charmet, Mark Nikolka, Dimitrios Simatos, Sensor for detecting analyte in an aqueous media comprising an organic semiconductor material, GB1621828.1(December 2016)
Tiesheng Wang, Stoyan Smoukov, Qiang Fu, Lijun Gao, Nanocomposite materials and methods of manufacture thereof, GB1813334.8 (August 2018).
Tiesheng Wang, Stoyan Smoukov, Hyun-Kyung Kim, Porous carbonaceous materials and methods for their manufacture, GB1801331.8 (January 2018).
Stoyan Smoukov, Tiesheng Wang, Kara Fong, Hyun-Kyung Kim, applied by Cambridge Enterprise Ltd, Polymer-based energy storage device, GB1712274.8 (July 2017).
Shijing Si, Tiesheng Wang, Jiaqi Zhang, Biqi Liu, One kind of anti-theft device luggage, CN205053148U (March 2016).
Ben Woodington, applied by Cambridge Enterprise, Medical device, Spinal cord stimulator, WO Patent WO2021005382A1, PCT/GB2020/051684, (2021)
Prizes, Awards and Scholarships
- Best poster at interCDT conference 2025
- Poster commendation at CUED bioengineering conference 2025
- IOP C R Barber Trust Travel Grant, £175 (2025)
- Association of British Spectroscopists Travel Grant, £500 (2025)
- Clare Hall Tutors' Fund Travel Grant, £600 (2025)
- 2025 Clare Hall Entrepreneurship Prize (with LiFETIME), £5000 (2025)
- Departmental Wiseman award 2025
- IEEE Percom best paper 2025
- MobiUK best presentation 2025
- £200 Prize - Pro2 Device Prototyping Summer School 2025
- Sensors Day best poster 2025
- CUED Div C conference best talk 2025
- Cambridge Philosophical Society Travel Grant 2025
- Douglas Timins Fund Award (Jesus College) 2025
- Sir Robbie Jennings Fund Award (Jesus College) 2025
- 2023 Sensor CDT Sensor Champion
- Fitzwilliam College Senior Scholarship 2025
- Best Sustainability Talk at CEB conference 2025
- Awarded £4,000 from Cambridge Global Challenges in an event called Smart Imaging Sandpit. The award is to be used for prototyping a device for malaria detection that we designed as a team.
- 1st place in the Venture Creation Weekends: Biotech and Healthcare organized by the Judge Business School. This was a three days event to commercialize biotech and healthcare ideas. I pitched my mini-project idea - potentially part of my PhD. The idea is to use Nanopore sensing for detecting DNA damage.
- Best talk prize in the Cavendish Graduate Conference. The title of the talk was “Detecting DNA Nicks Using Nanopore Sensing“.
- Selected as a NanoDTC associate, which entitles me to travel grant fundings that covers up to £3000.
- Special Contribution Award at Sensors Day (2023)
- (with Professor Peter Hutchinson (lead applicant), Farah Alimagham (co-applicant), Dr Keri Carpenter, Dr Tanya Hutter, Dr Nuria Marco-Garcia, Mr Adam Young and Ms Agnieszka Paulina Zakrewska) NIHR Invention for Innovation (i4i) Product Development award (£1,137,648 from 1 April 2020 for 36 months) to further develop the PhD research carried out on continuous online metabolite monitoring. Award research title: COMMIT - Continuous Online Metabolite Monitoring
- 1st Poster Prize (trophy) at Sensors in Medicine Conference aimed at bridging academic, clinical and commercial worlds (2019)
- Collaborative grant (£15,000) ChAMP and WAFT Collaboration Fund (2018)
- IEEE Travel Grant (€1k) to attend IEEE Sensors Council Summer School on Optical Fibre Sensors (2017)
- IDS Award (2015)
Silver medal in the engineering category of the annual STEM for Britain 2022 poster competition held at Westminster
Royce student access scheme grant
(with Ben Woodington) second place in the Mental Health and Neurology category for in-ear EEG app, at the MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack in Paris (2019)
- Winner of CDT art competition (2022)
- Vice Chancellor Social Impact Award Nomination (2022)
- RisingWise application (2021)
- Cambridge Finalist in FameLab
- Best poster prize at Sensors Day (2023)
- Engineering for Clinical Practice Grant (£3,000) (2018)
- Best poster prize at Sensors Day (2022)
- Best poster prize at Sensors Day (2022)
- Best talk prize at Sensors Day (2023)
- Best talk award at Sensors Day (2022)
- Cambridge Trust Award (2020)
- Nokia Bell Labs through the Mobile and Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence Centre Award (2020)
- School of Technology Award (2020)
- NanoDTC Associate's Grant (£2,500) (2019)
- ARUK East Network Pump Priming Grant (£5000) for the project “Intracellular thermometry and metabolic studies to quantify the energy flow and cost of amyloid-β 42 (Aβ42) aggregation and associated mitochondrial dysfunction in a live cell model”, awarded for March 2021 to Jul 2022.
- University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellors Award (2018)
Smart Imaging Sandpit Award (£4,000) (2019)
- EPSRC NPIF Award (2017)
- Trinity Henry-Barlow Scholarship (2019)
Scholarship to attend the International Early Detection of Cancer Summer School, held in Cambridge from 15 to 18 July 2019, organized by CRUK.
- Best speaker award at Sensors Day (2022)
- Cavendish Graduate Conference Best poster Award (2021)
- EPSRC NPIF and IDS Award (2018)
- Startup Sprint, Best Overall, Düsseldorf (2017)
- Hort Stipend, by Hedwig und Waldemar Hort Stiftung (2016)
- First place in the Robocup Rescue Virtual RobotSimulation (2018)
- First place in the RoboSoft Manipulation Competition (2018)
- IET Innovation Research Award for the development of soft 3D printed manipulators (2017)
- First place in the International Manipulation and Grasping Challenge, Canada IROS (2017)
- First place in the international RoboSoft locomotion soft robotics challenge, Livirno, Italy
- First place IROS 2016 Entrepreneurship Contest (Robotic lettuce harvesting)
- NanoDTC Travel Award (£3k)
- EPSRC NPIF Award (2014)
- Best poster (Ellipsoid localisation microscopy infers the size and order of protein layers in Bacillus spore coats), Photonex, London (2016)
- Best talk (Optical super-resolution microscopy for bacterial spore coat structure determination), Trinity College Science Symposium (2016)
- The Alan Turing Institute Data Study Group Learning Machine Award, April 2021. for the project: “Predictive Maintenance of Robotic Machining Tools Using Acceleration and Force Data”.
- IEEE Lance Stafford Larson Writing Award, April 2021. Second place for a paper entitled: “Efficient Programmable Random Variate Generation Accelerator from Sensor Noise”.
- NanoDTC Associates Competition Winner, December 2020. Winner in the competition for a proposal entitled: “Sensor Noise is as Ubiquitous as it is Annoying”.
- Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist, May 2020. Finalist in the competition for a proposal entitled: “Efficient Programmable Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation for Sensor Fusion”.
- Rohde and Schwartz Award, June 2018. Best project in the communications and signal processing area for masters dissertation entitled: “Star Type Wireless Sensor Network for Future Distributed Structural Health Monitoring Applications”.
- Alzheimers Research UK pump-priming grant award (April 2021)
- Cambridge Trust Award (2018)
- CAPE Acorn Postgraduate Research Award (£3k), Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, February 2017
CAPE Acorn Postgrade Research Award (£2k), for research on an engineering-related topic addressing a technological or societal need. Working with others to combine eye-tracking with holographic projection
(part of) Biomaker team who won award (£2750) to build a "Low cost SLM interface board for advanced microscopy and holographic display of biological structures"
- IUBMB-FEBS-PABMB Travel Award (2022)
- ESPRC IAA PDA grant, along with supervisor, Dr Luigi Occhipinti (Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge). The grant is a Partnership Development Award (PDA) with Applied NanoDetectors who supply £45k in-kind support and £5k in cash, to match the £45k EPSRC award. April-September 2019.
- Nigerian Presidential Scholarship (2015)
- EPSRC National Science Photography Competition winner in the Equipment and Facilities Category for Citizen Science Abroad (2019)
- Leslie Wilson Minor Scholarship, Magdalene College, Cambridge
- ARUK funded application (£243) to attend ARUK Annual Conference for a poster presentation
- Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship
- Cambridge Trust Award (2015)
- EPSRC Policy Fellowship (2019)
- Leete Premium Award for support of a student undertaking a PhD at the Institute for Manufacturing, Cambridge
- Armstrong Studentship for PhD project with Dr Roisin Owens (2019)
- Winner of Sensor CDT art competition (2022)
- Second prize for a student talk at Sensors Day (2020)
- Munro Studentship (awarded by Queens' College) for the academic year 2019/20. For supervision of the Part IB Natural Sciences Tripos subject 'Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’ for the college.
- Robert Barnes Prize (Chemical Engineering/Biotechnology) (established 2018) - awarded to a graduate student who, having obtained a distinction in the examinations, attains the highest aggregate mark from among all Queens' candidates for that examination, in either subject.
- EPSRC NPIF Award (2017)
- Winton-Berkeley exchange award by the Kavli/ENSI Institute
- EPSRC CDT Plural Twitter Photo context award 2017, 2nd prize
- IDS Award (2015)
- Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR) PhD Student Awards (2018)
- Chinese Scholarship Council Award (2014)
- Winner of Wolfson Enterprise Competition (2022)
- Phase II of the Cancer Research Tech Accelerator, 6-month mentorship programme and £70,000 prize to further develop the technology and business case.
Trinity Bradfield Award (£10k) for development of project formed as part of EnterpriseTECH (2019) - EPSRC FoF Grant (£40k) awarded to enable research to develop a spinal cord stimulator (2019)
- MRC Confidence-in-Concept (CiC) Fund (£70k) which will be used to test devices in Addenbrookes using cadaver models (2019)
- (with Theo Baissas) Second place in the Mental Health and Neurology category for in-ear EEG app, at the MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack in Paris (2019)
- Sensor Champion (2022)
- Cambridge Trust Award (2015)
Cohort Awards and Prizes
LiFETIME (members of 2022 cohort):
- 2025 Clare Hall Entrepreneurship Prize (with LiFETIME), £5000
Open-Seneca Team(members of 2017 cohort):
- University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor's award.
- Women4Climate Tech Challenge - Lorena Gordillo-Dagallier
- University of Cambridge Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant for "Co-creation for the development of soil testing sensors in Ethiopia", £15,000 awarded.
- Lorena Gordillo Dagallier: finalist at the C40 Women4Climate Tech Challenge (https://w4c.org/tech-challenge) as part of the Open-Seneca Team (2020).
University of Cambridge Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) GIAA grant for "A Citizen Science-based Mobile Air Quality Sensor Network in Buenos Aires", £2,000 awarded.
- University of Cambridge Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant for “Co-creating a context-appropriate mobile air quality sensor network for citizen science in Nairobi"; £15,000 awarded.
- Biomaker Challenge Grant to develop an incubator as part of the 2016 Team Challenge.
- First place in the Downing Enterprise competition for start-ups, awarded £25k towards developing an IoT based sensing system for assisted living using machine learning techniques as part of the 2015 Team Challenge.
- Co-founders Cambridge Assisted Living Technologies as part of the 2014 Team Challenge, December 2016-April 2017