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The School recently honoured the accomplishments of our students at two winter celebration events.
Winter graduation
The School’s Winter Graduation ceremony was held on Thursday 23 November 2023 in the historic McEwan Hall, honouring the hard work and dedication of our graduating students across nine MSc programmes.
The graduation ceremony began with a speech from Professor Peter Mathieson, Principal of the University of Edinburgh, reflecting on engineering student successes of the past year. These included our student sustainability pioneers who received University of Edinburgh Changemaker Awards; the competition successes of our Edinburgh University Formula Student team; and European Hyperloop Week, a major event dedicated to Hyperloop technology organised by students and hosted at the University of Edinburgh over summer.
Celebrations continued that evening at the School’s Winter Graduation reception at Dovecot Studios.
Prize giving ceremony
We also held a ceremony at the School the day before graduation, to award class prizes to students who had achieved outstanding performance during their undergraduate and MSc degree programmes over the past year.
There were around 50 prizes and medals awarded including:
- Jason Reese Prize – Awarded to Dagna Wójciak (MEng Hons Electronics and Electrical Engineering, 2023)
- Enrico Mastropaolo Prize – Awarded to Alexander Dahl (BEng Hons Mechanical Engineering, 2023)
These prizes were both created in honour of former members of School of Engineering staff who had passed away, and whose lives and work made a lasting impact on our community and the international field of engineering.
Read more about Professor Jason Reese and Dr Enrico Mastropaolo.
Recognition
Among the prize winners was Yikai Xia, who graduated with the BEng (Hons) Electronics and Electrical Engineering in summer 2023 and won the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Prize for outstanding performance on an IET-accredited degree programme.
Yikai joined from North China Electric Power University on the School’s 2+2 study programme and is now studying for a PhD in our School’s Institute for Imaging, Data and Communications (IDCOM).
“I am much honoured to win the IET prize, which represents the recognition of my hard work during the study. But studying hard is not enough to engineer a better world, applying my skills to advance engineering innovation is what I am looking ahead to.
“I am now carrying out PhD research in the School of Engineering, focusing on chemical species tomography using neural network for combustion diagnosis and environmental monitoring.”
~ Yikai Xia
