Publications Awards
Institute Awards
The William Gardner Award
Award criteria
Purpose: For the best paper published in the Proceedings of the NDT Annual Conference by a person in the early stages of their career (subject to a satisfactory oral presentation). The person concerned (or one of them, if there is more than one author who qualifies) must also present the paper in person at the conference and, at the discretion of the session chair, answer any questions from the audience.
Details of the award: A certificate and a cash sum of £250. Also, free membership of the Institute at an appropriate grade for one year.
Eligibility: The author of the paper must either be a student or within the first five years of full-time employment. He/she need not be a member of the Institute. In the case of multiple authorship, the early career-stage criterion must be satisfied by the first or second named author. If other authors also satisfy the criterion, the cash award is shared between all those authors satisfying the criterion, with each receiving a certificate. The free membership for one year is for the presenting author only.
The proposal regarding the first or second named author aims to ensure that the person being presented with the award has made a substantial contribution to the paper. Otherwise, there is a risk that the award could go, for example, to a multi-author paper having just one early career-stage author who only played a minor role in the work being reported.
Frequency: Yearly, if a suitable candidate is deemed.
Nomination arrangements: The author of an abstract and full paper for the event can indicate they wish to be considered when submitting online.
Four members of the panel are to be appointed by the NDT Technical Committee (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, subject to a satisfactory oral presentation.
Entries: Entries should be submitted by selecting the BPA option on Manuscript Central
Awarding arrangements: The award will be made mainly on the basis of the quality of the written paper, rather than on the quality of the oral presentation. This will allow the judging process to be completed before the conference. However, a check will be made to ensure that the quality of the oral presentation of the proposed winner is acceptable. Furthermore, candidates should demonstrate by the way they present the paper and answer any questions that they have made a substantial technical contribution to the paper.
Publicity: The award will be fully reported in Institute publications.
Presentation: The prize will normally be presented at the end of the NDT Annual Conference, though another appropriate Institute event may be chosen if necessary.
Committee: NDT Technical Committee.
Winners
2022 winner: Luka BergbreiterThe William Gardner Award for 2022 is awarded to Luka Bergbreiter from Siemens AG and the
Technical University of Munich, both in Germany, for his paper on precision simulation of ultrasonic testing defect echo scattering. 2002 Dr C Holmes
2003 Dr D Kleiner
2004 Dr C Holmes
2005 I Pettigrew
2006 D Caravaca
2008 A Sorsa
2009 C J Lane
2010 C Charlesworth
2011 Dr A Chertov
2012 Dr L Bai and E Escobar-Ruiz
2013 M Felice
2014 A McGilip
2015 J Rose
2016 F A Biruu, E Balaban, E Ahmad and M Missous
2017 D Zhang, K Burnham, L Mcdonald, C Macleod, G Dobie, R Summan and G Pierce
2018 Don Pieris
2019 J M Watson, C W Liang, J Sexton and M Missous
2020 No Award
2021 No Award
The John Grimwade Medal
Award criteria
Purpose: This prestigious award inaugurated in 1981 commemorates the late E J Grimwade MC HonFInstNDT, a major pioneering figure in the NDT world. The medal is awarded annually for the best paper by an Institute member to appear in the Institute’s journal in the preceding year.Award criteria
Details of the award: The best paper is selected from articles published by Institute members in Insight during the preceding year.
Eligibility: To be eligible, the article must be contributed by an Institute member.
Frequency: The prize will be awarded annually and will only be issued if suitable nominations are received.
Nomination arrangements: Articles published by a member of the Institute are selected from Insight and circulated to a judging panel for consideration. The judging panel will comprise the NDT Technical Committee (NDTTC) Chair and the Honorary Technical Editor, plus two other NDT members (nominated by the NDTTC Chair).
Awarding arrangements: A medal will be presented to the author who is an Institute member; all authors will receive a certificate and Institute pin.
Publicity: The award will be fully reported in Institute publications and the Secretariat will issue details in a press release to the technical and engineering institutional press.
Presentation: The medal and certificate will be awarded at the NDT Annual Conference, though another appropriate Institute event may be chosen if necessary.
Committee: NDT Technical Committee.
Winners
The recipients of the John Grimwade Medal for 2021 are Dr Stewart Haslinger, Professor Michael Lowe, Professor Richard Craster, Dr Peter Huthwaite and Dr Fan Shi for their paper, titled: ‘Prediction of reflection amplitudes for ultrasonic inspection of rough planar defects’, which was published in Insight, Vol 63, No 1, January 2021 (DOI: 10.1784/insi.2021.63.1.28).
Dr Stewart Haslinger holds a BSc and MSc in mathematics and was awarded his PhD, funded by the
prestigious Duncan Norman scholarship, on the mathematical modelling of flexural waves in structured elastic plates in 2014, all from the University of Liverpool. Stewart was a postdoctoral researcher for six years, including three years with the Imperial College Non-Destructive Evaluation group. He was appointed as a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Liverpool in 2020.Stewart’s research interests focus on wave propagation and scattering for a variety of applications, including ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation (NDE), structured elastic solids and underwater acoustics, and he has published more than 15 research papers in these areas. He is also a co-creator of the software package Scatter, which rapidly calculates the amplitudes and intensities of ultrasonic waves scattering from rough surfaces, using analytical and theoretical modelling methods.
Professor Michael Lowe holds a BSc in civil engineering and an MSc and PhD in mechanical
engineering. He worked in engineering consultancy with WS Atkins from 1979 to 1989 before moving to Imperial College London in 1989, where he is now Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Michael’s main research is in ultrasound NDE, particularly guided waves, scattering, materials characterisation and industrial applications. He pioneered the use of finite element methods for the simulation of NDE and created the guided wave software package ‘Disperse’. He has published around 300 papers related to these topics.
Michael was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014 for his research contributions to NDE and is a founder director of the guided wave technology company Guided Ultrasonics Ltd.
Michael was winner of the Roy Sharpe Prize in 2010, the Roentgen Prize in 2012 and the SPIE Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Professor Richard Craster completed his PhD on fracture in porous elastic materials in 1992 while
based at Schlumberger Cambridge Research and Imperial College London. He has spent the majority of his career in the Mathematics Department at Imperial College London and also as a member of Mechanical Engineering. He is currently Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences. Richard has long-standing research interests in elastic waves, methodologies and software, recently co-founding Quaisr Ltd, which is developing infrastructure for digital twins. He has published over 200 research papers and holds scientific advisory positions for several companies.
Dr Peter Huthwaite completed his PhD on breast ultrasound tomography in the Imperial NDT group in
2012 and subsequently joined the group as an academic in 2015, being promoted to Reader in 2021. Peter leads imaging research within the group, developing solutions for high-resolution guided wave tomography and other inversion schemes, with both bulk and guided ultrasonic waves. He has secured over £1.5 million in funding for his research. He has also developed the finite element (FE) package Pogo for simulating ultrasound, which is now in worldwide use, selling over £200k worth of licences.
Dr Fan Shi obtained his PhD degree in 2016 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, under the supervision of Professor Michael Lowe. His PhD thesis was awarded the Unwin Prize for the best thesis of the department.
Fan Shi worked in the same group until 2019, before joining the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as an Assistant Professor. His research interests mainly include ultrasonic NDE, rough surface scattering, wave imaging and inversion, and ultrasonic materials evaluation.
Past winners:
1980 Mr S I Ibrahim and Mr V N Whittaker
1981 Mr D A W Pullen
1982 Mr R F Lumb
1983 Dr J M Farley and Mr J L Thomson
1984 Mr A N Robinson, Mr P Nolan and Mr G A Raine
1985 Mr C N Owston
1986 Dr D N Shackleton
1987 Dr J Ogilvy
1988 Dr P Highmore and Dr K A Short
1989 Dr G A Georgiou
1990 Dr P A Cawley
1991 Dr A McNab
1992 Dr J R Rudlin and Dr L C Wolstenholme
1993 Prof J H Bungey
1994 Dr F A Wedgwood
1995 Mr R A Smith
1996 Dr A McNab and Dr A Cochran
1997 Prof G Hayward, Mr R Banks and Mr R Farlow
1998 Prof G Hayward and Mr P Reynolds
1999 Dr A Khalid
2000 Dr B W Drinkwater, Dr A M Robinson and Dr R J Freemantle
2001 Mr R A Smith and Dr G R Hugo
2002 Dr S Dixon, Dr C Edwards and Prof S B Palmer
2003 Dr L L Morgan, Mr P Nolan, Mr A Kirkham and Mr R Wilkinson
2004 Dr E A Birt, Mr L D Jones, Mr R A Smith and Prof C B Scruby
2005 Dr A Sophian, Dr R S Edwards, Prof G-Y Tian, Dr S Dixon, Dr D Topp and Dr M Smith
2006 Mrs A Whittle
2007 Prof P Cawley
2008 Dr L Nelson
2009 Dr R A Smith
2010 Mr C Lane
2011 Prof D P Almond
2012 Prof P Cawley
2013 Prof D Mery
2014 Prof P Cawley, Dr N Brierley and Dr T Tippetts
2015 Dr C Mineo, Prof S G Pierce, Mr B Wright, Prof I Cooper and Dr P I Nicholson
2016 Dr Chris Ward and Dr Colin Brett
2017 Professor Peter Charlton, Dr Stephen Mosey, Dr Miles Weston and Dr Mark Sutcliffe
2018 Dr Colin R Brett, Dr David A Gunn, Dr Ben A J Dashwood, Simon J Holyoake and Dr Paul B Wilkinson
2019 Dr David A Gunn, Simon J Holyoake, Dr Ben A J Dashwood, Dr Paul B Wilkinson,
Dr Colin R Brett, Humphrey C Wallis, Wayne Leman and Professor John G Rees
2020 Dr Tomasz Pialucha, Dr Brian Pavlakovic, Dr David Alleyne and Professor Peter Cawley
The Ron Halmshaw Award
Award criteria
Purpose: The Ron Halmshaw Award is awarded for the best paper published in Insight in the preceding year, on any aspect of industrial radiography or radiology.Details of the award: The prize is in the form of a certificate and a fixed award sum (£350) by cash from the Ron Halmshaw Fund. (In the case of non-members, part of the prize would be one year's membership.)
Eligibility: To be eligible, the paper must be on the appropriate subject and may be contributed by a member or a non-member.
Frequency: Yearly, if a suitable candidate is deemed.
Nomination arrangements: All members of the Institute’s NDT Technical Committee will be invited to submit nominations for the award.
Entries: Entries submitted (on a form to be made available by the Institute) will be sent to the Secretary of the Institute.
Awarding arrangements: In January each year, a memo is issued to the judging panel, containing voting instructions, marking sheet, shortlist of name(s), paper title, issue, month and page number and a voting form embossed with the Institute seal. The deadline for return to the Secretariat is 31 March. A judging panel of three is appointed by the NDT Technical Committee.
In the interest of achieving fair, bias-free results, a system is operated that requires each panel member (any listed authors excepted) to vote anonymously to the Awards Secretary, who is responsible for totalling up the points awarded and notifying the winner to the Secretary.
Publicity: The award will be fully reported in Institute publications and the Secretariat will issue details in a press release to the technical and engineering institutional press.
Presentation: The prize will normally be presented at the NDT Annual Conference, though another appropriate Institute event may be chosen if necessary.
Committee: NDT Technical Committee.
Winners
The 2021 winners are Mahdi Mirzapour, Amir Movafeghi and Effat Yahaghi for their paper, titled: ‘Quantitative weld defect sizing using convolutional neural network-aided processing of RT images’, which appeared in Insight, Vol 63, No 3, March 2021 (DOI: 10.1784/insi.2021.63.3.141).
Mahdi Mirzapour earned a PhD degree in applied mathematics in 2015 from Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran. From 2014 to 2015, he was a Research Assistant at the Utah Center for Advanced Imaging Research (UCAIR), Utah, USA. He is now an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mathematics, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran. His research interests are in the computational aspects of imaging problems.
Associate Professor Amir Movafeghi has a PhD in radiation medical engineering and is an NDT Level 3 certificate holder. He is currently with the Materials Engineering Center, NDT Labs, Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute (NSTRI), Tehran, Iran.
Amir is a member of the ISO/TC 135 corresponding national committee for NDT standards, the Iranian Society for Nondestructive Testing (IRNDT) and the Iranian Society of Machine Vision and Image Processing (ISMVIP). His research interests include digital radiography, image processing in NDT applications, radiography simulations and NDT certification systems.
Associate Professor Effat Yahaghi (Mrs) has a PhD in radiation medical engineering. She is a lecturer of physics with the Department of Physics at Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran. Her research interests include image processing, digital radiography, backscatter imaging and dual-energy X-ray systems. Recently, she has been working on digital radiography techniques for cultural heritage objects.
Past winners:
1995 J-E Holmström
1996 Dr E A Birt
1997 A B Wooldridge, Dr R K Chapman, Dr G A Georgiou, I Munns and G S Woodcock
1998 Dr S Ekinci, N Bas, M Aksu, A Yıldırım, M Bingöldag, T Kurtcebe, M Dogruöz, S Sarıçam and N Yılmaz
1999 A McNulty, J McNab and W K J Greenwood
2000 P R Vaidya
2001 R R da Silva, M H S Siqueira, L P Calôba and J M A Rebello
2002 A G Vincent, V Rebuffel, R Guillemaud, L Gerfault and P Y Coulon
2003 Dr G A Georgiou and Mr C R A Schneider
2004 S Smalley and G Wilson
2005 D Mery, D Hahn and N Hitschfeld
2006 Dr G-R Jaenisch, C Bellon, U Samadurau, M E Zhukovskiy and S V Podoliako
2007 V Rebuffel and J-M Dinten
2008 S F Burch and B A Stow
2009 Q Shen, J Gao and C Li
2010 K Arunmutha, P Arun Kumar, T Saravanan, J Philip, T Jayakumar and B Raj
2011 Dr S F Burch
2012 V Riffo and D Mery / J Guo, L Zeng, B Li and W Yu
2013 X Zhao, J-J Hu, T Yang and F Wang
2014 W Gao and Y H Hu
2015 Ge Lijing, Li Linsheng, Xie Jialong and Lin Guoxiang
2016 Changying Dang, Jianmin Gao, Zhao Wang, Yulin Xiao and Yalin Zhao
2017 Domingo Mery, Vladimir Riffo, Irene Zuccar and Christian Pieringer
2018 Stefano Ridolfi
2019 Johann Kastner, Christian Gusenbauer, Bernhard Plank, Jonathan Glinz and Sascha Senck
2020 Andreas Michael Stock, Gabriel Herl, Professor Dr Tomas Sauer and Professor Dr-Ing Jochen Hiller
Details of all Institute awards can be found here.
