Beating 107 for the UK's top young research engineers, Cleo Choong was awarded the 2003 BP Younger Engineers Award and Gold Medal for Excellence in Engineering by a Younger Engineer at the House of Commons reception on 15 December. The competition's aim is to present a panorama of high quality engineering research, with participants having to prepare posters describing their work and present them to various MPs and representatives of industry - this years' event was hosted by Richard page MP.

In her award-winning presentation entitled 'Engineering Living Bone', Cleo, a former student in the department who graduated in 2001 with a 1st class MEng in Materials Engineering in Medicine, illustrated how to grow artificial bones using a biodegradable polymer. Her current research, undertaken at Oxford University, hopes to discover the fundamental elements responsible for natural regeneration and exploit them for therapeutic applications. By using a novel architecture, biodegradable polymeric scaffold, Cleo has successfully modified the surface of the otherwise hydrophobic polymer to improve bone cell adhesion and proliferation. 'The challenge for bone tissue engineers is to grow faster and better bone that automatically incorporates a blood vessel network into the tissue' says Cleo, pictured with her winners medal. 'The results obtained so far have shown that the scaffold geometry used allowed the infiltration of host blood vessels. This suggests that by taking into account a number of key factors that make tissue engineering possible, we are proceeding in the right direction towards engineering bone.'

The prestigious prize includes a cash award of £5,000 and a solid gold medal worth an estimated £2,500. The department congratulates Cleo on her Achievement.

(Materials World, February 2004)