Dr Rehan Shah received the Queen Mary Students Union (QMSU) Education Award for 'Sustainability Champion of the Year' at the recent 2026 education awards ceremony hosted at the Drapers Hall in London. The award celebrates a member of teaching or academic staff who has incorporated sustainability into their teaching or activities for students this year.

Dr Shah was awarded this prize (which included a certificate and a trophy) for his pioneering work over the past 3 years focusing on embedding ethics and sustainability within mathematics problems through the first and second-year undergraduate mathematics modules he leads in the School for all engineering students. As part of this ongoing scholarship research project (which has featured 2 engineering undergraduate students as co-creators), Dr Shah has, with their support, developed a comprehensive toolkit of resources featuring exercise problems, solutions, visual posters and formative practice quizzes, which have been implemented and evaluated by student responses received through dedicated surveys in these modules.

In his speech, Dr Shah was immensely grateful to his student co-creators, Ms Malmi Mahagamage and Ms Meherun Soud, as well to all the students in his modules, who nominated, recognised and appreciated his work in this project and said:

"Thank you so very much for this QMSU Sustainability Champion award for this year. I am extremely grateful to all my Year 1 and 2 undergraduate students from my mathematics modules who nominated me for this award and I am very pleased that they enjoyed and benefitted immensely from the integration of ethics and sustainability concepts within mathematics problems, a scholarship research project which I have been working on, supported by 2 very able current undergraduate researchers, for the past 3 years at QMUL.

In addition to impacting over 800 undergraduate students every year across our large modules, we have also been able to generate institutional impact through incorporation of this work into Queen Mary Academy's flagship sustainability STEAM short course and wider external impact through collaborations with the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh to produce forthcoming journal papers and an educator handbook. Thank you once again to QMSU and to all our students at QMUL."