Early-career engineers recognised at Healthcare Technologies Awards

IMechE’s Biomedical Division hosted the 2026 Healthcare Technologies Student and Early Career Awards.

The annual competition brings together undergraduate and postgraduate students from universities across the UK to present innovative research.

This year's projects included AI, biomechanics, regenerative medicine and wearable technologies. The judges were impressed by both the technical quality of the research and the high standard of presentations.

IMechE Biomedical Engineering Division prize

Winner 

 
James Entwistle, Sheffield Hallam University: Enhancing Red Blood Cell Interaction Models with a Novel Lattice Boltzmann Framework 

Runners-up 

Yanni Cai, Cranfield University: Anatomical differences in flatfoot pathology 

Venkata Sai Mahesh Peddapeta, University of Leeds: Blood-induced cartilage degradation in haemophilic arthropathy  

Best Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Project and SmartBox prize

Winner

Thomas Finlay, University of Southampton: Ultrasound Responsive Microbubbles for Delivery of Wnt3A Protein in Bone Healing 
 
Runners-up 
Balvinder Kaur Dhillon, Queen Mary University of London: Developing a Multimodal Deep Learning Pipeline for Automated Glioma Subregion Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction with Integrated Spatial Analysis for Clinical Insight 

Catherine Simpson, University of Southampton: Mapping the Variation of Articular Cartilage Thickness in the First (Thumb) Carpometacarpal Joint using Micro(μ)-Computed Tomography Scans 

Best Biomedical Engineering Postgraduate Project 

Winner

 
James Entwistle, Sheffield Hallam University: Enhancing Red Blood Cell Interaction Models with a Novel Lattice Boltzmann Framework 

Runners-up

Harini Sampath Kumar, Robert Gordon University: Nanocavity Polymer-Stabilized Microbubbles: A Potential Candidate for Enhanced Theranostic Applications 

Ekgari Kasawala, Aston University: User-Centric Wearables: Position-Independent TinyML for Flexible ADL Recognition. 
 
Congratulations to all the participants and many thanks to the judges and sponsors for their support of the awards.  

With thanks to Sam Vennin, IMechE Biomedical Division Young Members Panel