Five young engineers, including TumourVue founder Dr Gita Khalili Moghaddam, have each received a prestigious award and a £3,000 prize from the Royal Academy of Engineering for achieving early success in their career. They were presented with their awards from HRH The Princess Royal, Royal Fellow of the Academy, during a specially arranged visit to the Thames Tideway Project in London on 6 July.
All five are winners of the RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition, awarded by the Academy with support from the Worshipful Company of Engineers.
The overall winner, Dr Marzia Bolpagni, also received the Sir George Macfarlane Medal for excellence in the early stage of her career.
Dr Gita Khalili Moghaddam is CEO of TumourVue Ltd, which she co-founded in 2018 to address a pronounced unmet need in cancer surgery. Based at the University of Cambridge’s Biomedical Innovation Hub and with funding from the Medtech Accelerator, TumourVue’s technology combines real-time imaging and AI to distinguish a viable tumour from normal brain tissue. Gita innovated the system to improve outcomes for cancer patients undergoing surgery by allowing the surgeon to identify the edges of the tumour accurately, to help preserve as much healthy tissue as possible.
Having obtained her PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge in 2017, Gita is currently on secondment at GSK Global Health until 2023 as a UKRI Innovation Scholar, taking a leading role in the use of AI in tuberculosis drug development.
In 2019, she was awarded a prestigious Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in recognition of her outstanding research in the field of biomedical engineering. As an academic entrepreneur, she has been widely recognised as one of the top 18 women in AI & Data by Innovate UK (2019), a BioBeat Mover & Shaker in BioBusiness (2020) and a top contender for Cofinitive 21toWatch (2021).