Two Queens' Fellows elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering

Queens' has much to celebrate this year as two Fellows, Richard Prager and alumnus and Fellow Benefactor Demis Hassabis (1994), have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Each year, fifty of the UK’s top engineers are elected as Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The prestigious list includes some of the world’s leading innovators and business people.

Professor Richard Prager, pictured left, has made a significant contribution to the development of three-dimensional ultrasonic medical imaging. His work is characterised by robust and efficient algorithms for use in a clinical environment. He has also significantly advanced the development of engineering education in the UK through his leadership of the University of Cambridge’s undergraduate engineering course.

Dr Demis Hassabis is the Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company that develops general-purpose learning algorithms. Since it was founded in London in 2010, DeepMind has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, three of them in the scientific journal Nature – an unprecedented achievement for a computer science lab. DeepMind’s groundbreaking work includes the development of deep reinforcement learning. This technique underpinned AlphaGo, a computer program that defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016 in a breakthrough that experts proclaimed to have arrived a decade ahead of its time. In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google in its largest ever European acquisition, and is now part of the Alphabet group.