Balvinder Dhillon, who graduated with an MEng in Biomedical Engineering this year, has once again won the Global Undergraduate Award for Engineering — having also received the honour last year.

The Global Undergraduate Awards, often nicknamed the ‘Junior Nobel Prize’, is the world’s leading programme for recognising exceptional undergraduate work. Winning entries gain international visibility, and recipients benefit from new connections across academia and industry.

Balvinder won this year for her paper: ‘Developing a Multimodal Deep Learning Pipeline for Automated Glioma Subregion Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction with Integrated Spatial Analysis for Clinical Insight’ - which sits at the intersection of AI, robotics and healthcare. Her project, which she undertook during her fourth year at Queen Mary, was supervised by Professor Zion Tse and Dr Hadi Sadati.

This year’s awards received 3,567 submissions from 352 universities across 99 countries, placing Balvinder’s project in the top 1%.

Balvinder is one of only two people in the history of the awards to achieve two consecutive wins, and the only person from the Engineering category to do so.

She was thrilled to share that at the awards ceremony in Dublin on Tuesday 11th November, former Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Simon Coveney, told her he was “very excited to see what I get up to in the future” and “very impressed by the double win.”

Her supervisor, Professor Zion Tse, praised Balvinder, saying: "Balvinder is a highly motivated and dedicated student who always strives for excellence. She sets ambitious goals and approaches them with real determination and focus. She showed strong organisational skills when managing her final year design project with a team of students, and her clear and engaging communication skills really stood out. She’s a creative thinker who consistently brings fresh ideas to the table."

Balvinder is currently studying an MSc in Human and Biological Robotics at Imperial College London.