UKESF Scholars Receive National Recognition

The EW BrightSparks 2019 have just been announced, and the UKESF is delighted to congratulate the four scholars who made the list this year. This is a fantastic result; double the number selected in 2018. We are extremely proud of the quality and high calibre of the students that join our undergraduate Scholarship Scheme – one of the reasons the value of the scheme is increasingly recognised by companies right across the Electronics sector – and it is heartening when they receive public recognition.

The EW BrightSparks programme is run by Electronics Weekly in partnership with RS Components, and aims to highlight the brightest young electronic engineers in the UK. This year’s winners were celebrated at an event at The IET in London on 2nd May.

• Emma Curati-Alasonatti was a UKESF scholar from 2014 to 2017 and studied at the University of Southampton. She was sponsored by Arm, where she now works as an Engineer, and in 2018 was awarded Young Engineer of the Year at the TechWorks Awards. Emma made the list for “a graduate project focused on hardware vulnerabilities caused by speculation, examining various cache side-channel attacks and implementing detections and she wrote attack benchmarks for testing detection systems”, along with her volunteering “at primary schools to run after school code clubs for Key Stage 2 pupils, and through the UK Electronics Skills Foundation, being a former scholar herself, she mentors current scholars”.
• Nathan Ruttley was a UKESF scholar from 2014 to 2016, sponsored by NVIDIA, and studied at the University of Southampton. He is now an Electronic Engineer at RPD International and made the list for being “project lead for a Smart Home Radiator Valve designed to save users energy and money, working on behalf of a UK customer to turn their early stage prototype into a manufacturable and marketable product” and, with the client’s engineering team, “helped to integrate the firmware and hardware, which also involved creating the specification for the client’s test firmware. He then designed the electronic testing and provisioning equipment for the factory production line.”
• Lousia Smith was a UKESF scholar from 2011 to 2014 and studied at the University of Southampton. She was sponsored by Imagination Technologies, where she is now a Leading Hardware Engineer. She made the list for being “responsible for the verification environment for a complex module that controls scheduling and manages resources in the GPU and also contains a MCU, improving the verification code and documentation and standardising the methodology, which reduced the required number of testbenches from forty-nine to just two” and “At university she helped start the Robogals Southampton chapter. She also helped with a Headstart course run jointly by the University of Southampton and the UKESF and has supported several events in local secondary schools.”
• Ricki Tura is a current UKESF scholar (2016–20), sponsored by UltraSoC (now acquired by Siemens), and studies at the University of Southampton. He made the list as “In 2018, he won TechWorks’s UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) Scholar of the Year and was sponsored by UltraSoC. His document generating tool creates formatted DOCX tables from multiple XML sources to reduce the amount of errors in IP documentation.” He is also “described as an integral part of Southampton University’s 2,000 strong Electronics and Computer Science Society, for which he was elected president. The society has since seen a two-fold increase in participation at industry partner events.”

If you would like your company to join our Scholarship Scheme and connect with exceptional undergraduates like Emma, Nathan, Louisa and Ricki, details can be found here or by contacting [email protected].