The recent UTS Engineering and Information Technology 2010 Faculty Prize Night celebrated as high a calibre of students as ever - over forty prizes were awarded to seventy-five of the best faculty students of the year. The prizes are awarded to both undergraduate and postgraduate students and range across all areas of engineering and IT.
Perhaps one of the most exciting prizes of the night is a position on the Dean’s Merit List, which recognises the top ten students from both the engineering and IT disciplines. The Dean, Professor Hung Nguyen, also awards a prize each semester for the best capstone presentation which, in 2010, were both taken home by mechanical and mechatronic engineering students. Greg Peters was awarded the spring semester Capstone Presentation Award for his work on the design and construction of a prototype climbing robot, and for the autumn semester, Luke Cogar took home the prize for work on combined cooling methods applied to humanoid robotic systems.
There are also a large number of prizes awarded from industry sponsors including the Australian Steel Institute Undergraduate Design Award, this year presented to Dirk Engelbert for best overall performance in structural steel design. The Information Technology students are also well represented with awards including the Oracle Database Prize, this year going to Liming Zou for excellence in the Database Fundamentals subject, and the Custom Ware Advanced Internet Programming Prize which was presented to postgraduate Masters of Internet Technology student Jason Howard. The number of industry awards is not surprising given UTS’s close involvement with industry partners.
In the Dean’s words, “...the students receiving awards...have excelled in their particular areas of study as a result of hard work and commitment.” With students such as these, it seems the future of our engineering and IT industries is secure.
