Young engineers win three SoPHE awards

Congratulations to Brittany Harris, Amelia Paszkowski and Ross Boulton, who each won a Young Engineers Award at last night’s Society of Public Health Engineers’ dinner in London.

The award challenged the next generation of engineers to solve a complex problem in the field of public health engineering. This year the young engineers were tasked with designing a flood defence that could be deployed to protect a bungalow in the event of severe flooding. The winners – Brittany Harris, Amelia Paszkowski and Ross Boulton, a cross department team from Water and Sustainability – created an affordable, sturdy and user-friendly flood defence on a household scale.

BuroHappold’s young engineers responded to their wins with the following comments:

It was an amazing experience; we learned a lot as a team and had great fun in the process. Thank you to everyone who listened to us practice our pitch and scrutinised our design!

Brittany Harris, water graduate engineer
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Working on the design of this flood defence has been great fun and a true achievement. It’s fantastic news that we received the SoPHE Young Engineers Award for our work, and the appreciation and recognition for a genuine solution to flooding in the UK. I am absolutely delighted.

Amelia Paszkowski, graduate water engineer

Entering the SoPHE young engineers award has taken me out of my comfort zone into a different field of work and I am a better engineer because
of it.

Ross Boulton, graduate sustainability engineer  

By collating multiple light-weight components to create sturdy and stable structure, the Buro Happold team has shown that it will be easy to assemble, affordable, and can be implemented by any age range – all very important considerations when wishing to encourage as many of those at risk of flood to use the barriers.

The winning design is also sustainable both in terms of its components and its process of implementation.