Roy Sharpe Prize

Award criteria

Purpose: The Roy Sharpe Prize is to be awarded annually by the NDT Technical Committee of the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing to recognise a significant contribution, over a period of at least 10-15 years, through research and development in any branch of NDT to the benefit of industry or society.

Sponsorship: Invitations to sponsor the cash prize will be issued each year to all organisations in Corporate membership of the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing. When more than one organisation is desirous of being the sponsor, the selection shall be by lot. The sponsor’s name will be prominently mentioned in all publicity associated with the prize for the year in question and will feature on the Honours Board at Institute HQ. The company that has sponsored the award will not be invited to participate in future years unless no other Corporate member wishes to do so.

Details of the award: The award will be in the form of a certificate and backed by a cash sum of £350.

Eligibility: The award may be won by any research worker or group of named research workers. This is intended to recognise a contribution over a period of at least 10-15 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.

Frequency: Yearly, if a suitable candidate is deemed.

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

Nominations for the award shall come from the NDT Technical Committee (NDTTC) (nominations may also be submitted by any other BINDT Committee, in which case these shall passed to the Chair of the NDTTC for consideration), which will be tabled as an agenda item at a meeting. 

If there is only one nomination, then the NDTTC 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 NDTTC. 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. The winner will present a plenary paper at the NDT Annual Conference Opening Ceremony.

Awarding arrangements: The award will be made at the NDT Annual Conference Dinner and will be awarded by the Chair of the NDTTC.  

The sponsoring organisation (when applicable) will be invited to decide who is to make the presentation and the person chosen will be the Institute’s guest at the Conference Dinner when the award is presented.

Publicity: The award will be fully reported in Institute publications.

Committee: NDT Technical Committee.

2022 winner: Dave Lines
Sponsor: The Roy Sharpe Prize was not sponsored in 2022

The 2022 Roy Sharpe Prize is awarded to Dave Lines.

Dave Lines graduated from the University of Oxford with a BA in natural science in 1975, while on a 1-3-1 ‘thick sandwich’ course with EMI. The first of two attachments with its Central Research Laboratories after university
was with Godfrey Hounsfield’s group working on X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanners. The second was
with the ultrasound group, where he stayed on as a Principal Research Engineer, first on medical phased array imagers but later extending to other medical, non-destructive testing (NDT) and sonar applications. During this time, he completed an MSc in systems science at City University, London. While investigating adaptive compensation for velocity variations in tissue, the array was treated as a distributed data collection system, where the full raw data acquisition is separated from the coherent image reconstruction. This approach was then also used for NDT, where a special case is now more commonly known as full matrix capture plus the total focusing method (FMC+TFM).

Following EMI’s exit from the medical business, in 1984 Dave moved to Diagnostic Sonar Ltd (DSL), in Livingston, as Project Manager for a new range of medical and NDT scanners, before eventually becoming Chief Engineer in 1991. Over the decades, the instrumentation changed from being fully customised to PC-controlled, before finally existing as modular hardware supplied with open-source firmware and software. UK and international collaborations, with both companies and academia, complemented the in-house research and development (R&D) projects covering transducer frequency ranges from 20 kHz to 70 MHz.

Rather than retiring when DSL went into liquidation in 2018, Dave joined the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering, where he is primarily involved in robotic in-process inspection but still retains a wide interest across all NDT and medical applications. He also continues to support all the old DSL customers via his consultancy business, FITsonix, which has taken on all DSL’s imaging IP.