The Anne Birt Award

Open award for members and non-members 

Award criteria

Purpose: The purpose of this award is to recognise significant contributions to technology innovation, technology transfer or technology strategy in the field of NDT over a period of at least 5-10 years.

Eligibility: Nominees can be individuals or groups who have made a significant contribution to NDT technology, either through R&D, technology transfer into industry or developing strategy leading to new technology development and exploitation. Nominations can be made for individuals who have undertaken these activities themselves or for those in management and leadership roles who have successfully facilitated such technology innovations. Nominations can relate to a specific technology innovation or for contributions to a number of innovations over their career, including those providing significant contributions in a support role. 

This is intended to recognise contributions over a period of at least 5-10 years.

The proposer of the award should be a voting member of the Institute. If they are not, they will need to ensure the application is endorsed by an Institute voting member.

Details of the award: The award will consist of a certificate backed by £300 cash, an invitation to the NDT Annual Conference Dinner, including free registration for the day of the conference and one night’s accommodation. In the case of a group award, the invitation to the Conference Dinner will be made to one representative.  

Frequency: It is anticipated that one award will be made annually, providing that suitable nominations are received.  

Nomination arrangements: Nominations should be submitted by email to: karen.cambridge@bindt.org

Nominations for the award will be reviewed by the NDT Sub-Committee. If there is only one nomination, then the NDT Sub-Committee should vote to confirm whether the nomination is eligible and, if so, to approve the award. 

If there is more than one nomination, then the entries should be sent for judging by a panel set up for the purpose. Four members of the panel are to be appointed by the NDT Sub-Committee. Each judge will be invited to score the entries on a point scale of 0 to 3 and send the scores to Karen Cambridge, who will total the scores, and the entry receiving the most points will be declared the winner.

Awarding arrangements: The award will be made at the NDT Annual Conference Dinner and will be awarded by the Chair of the NDT Sub-Committee or by the President.

Committee: NDT Sub-Committee.




Winners


2024 winner: Dr Tim Stevenson

The Anne Birt Award for 2024 is awarded to Dr Tim Stevenson.

Tim is Co-founder and CEO of Ionix Advanced Technologies, which has grown to become a world leader in ultrasonics for extreme environments. 

Tim graduated from the University of Leeds with an MEng in materials science and a PhD on the development of high-temperature piezoelectrics in 2010. Subsequently, he co-founded Ionix with the aim of developing ultrasonic sensors and sensor systems built on HPZ, the unique piezo material.

Tim and the Ionix team have since commercialised HotSense, an innovative, modular, intrinsically safe, high-temperature ultrasonic platform. Now widely adopted, it is used in a variety of applications in non-destructive testing (NDT), from high-resolution corrosion monitoring to on-stream time-of-flight diffraction weld inspections and corrosion mapping, enabling asset integrity assessments without shutdown and with increased efficiency.

As such, Tim is now globally recognised as a technical authority and thought leader in extreme environment ultrasonic testing, contributing to technical committees and academic panels in North America, the UK and Europe.

In 2019, Tim was made Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and currently sits on the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing (BINDT)’s Condition Monitoring (CM) Sub-Committee.

Past winners:

2016    Keith Newton and Peter Thayer
2017    Dr Stephen F Burch
2018    Professor Ian Cooper CEng FInstNDT MWeldI
2019    Marty Graen
2020    Eskil Skoglund Yngve Raudberget
2021    Dr Colin Brett
2022    Guillaume Pierre
2023    Professor Gareth Pierce


A nomination form can be downloaded here.

Details of all Institute awards can be found here.