Three finalists have been shortlisted for Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert Award, celebrating innovation, commercial success and the benefit to society of UK technology.
Andor Technology’s highly sensitive camera that enables scientists to map a genome in just a few hours is up for the award. It will be competing against JBA Consulting’s hyper-accurate flood risk prediction and a cutting-edge concept car for the road developed by Jaguar Land Rover.
The winner will be announced on 26 June at the Academy’s Awards Dinner and receive a gold medal plus £50,000 cash prize. Previous recipients include Microsoft Research, Cambridge, for its Xbox Kinect human motion-capture system and Arup’s National Aquatic Centre, better known as the ‘Water Cube’ – the dramatic centrepiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The 2012 finalists were selected from a long list of over 40 nominations, drawn from every field of contemporary engineering. Although the shortlisted innovations are very different from one another, the three share a similar DNA as they were developed in the UK to create future facing products, opening up new markets and achieving international sales success.
