Department of Engineering / News / Keno Mario-Ghae receives ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ award

Department of Engineering

Keno Mario-Ghae receives ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ award

Keno Mario-Ghae receives ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ award

Keno with CUER solar car 'Endeavour' and a model of 'Evolution'

Alumnus Keno Mario-Ghae is the proud recipient of the The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ award.

This award means a lot and has already enabled me to meet and share ideas with great engineers and next generation engineers across our industry and I look forward to more collaborations, potentially across industries.

Keno Mario-Ghae

The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI) is the UK trade association representing the electronic systems, microelectronics and semiconductor communities. Its objective is “to catalyse and accelerate the continual development of a sustainable and world-leading industry in the UK”. The NMI looks to connect people across the UK and Ireland’s electronics industry to strengthen and build up the eco-system of talent, whether from enterprise or academia and the annual awards are there to recognise achievement. The Young Engineer award celebrates and encourages the efforts of young engineers.  To quote from the NMI:

“Applicants are required to demonstrate exemplary contribution to the electronic engineering profession, the employers business success/competitiveness (or improvement) and personal achievement.”

Introducing the award, Derek Boyd, CEO of the NMI said that in his opinion the Young Engineer award was the hardest of all the evening’s 13 awards to win, with submissions for the award from up to 20 high-quality applicants.

Keno Mario-Ghae Young engineer of the year

From this list, four young engineers were shortlisted, but Keno came out on top to win the award. The judges credited him for the difference he had made to Imagination Technologies in the relatively short time that he has been with the company.

At Imagination, Keno works as part of the MIPS-powered Creator Ci40 IoT kit and presented on it at the RIOT summit in Berlin in July 2016. He has worked on enhancing the usability of the development board and reducing the development time. He also spearheaded the adoption of “LetMeCreate” libraries for the Creator kit, which have helped reduce the average time of developing a first project from days or weeks down to minutes.

Keno has a degree in Engineering and a Master’s degree in Manufacturing and Management, both from Cambridge University. He also has a keen interest in solar power. He was part of Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER) team from October 2011, and he ran the team during the 2013 World Solar Challenge. He has been working on developing solar energy for powering ovens and low-cost computers for the developing world.

Keno, what does winning this award mean to you?

I’m honoured and excited to have won Young Engineer of the Year Award at 20th NMI awards. It is a prestigious award and the calibre of candidates was really high. This award means a lot and has already enable me to meet and share ideas with great engineers and next generation engineers across our industry and I look forward to more collaborations, potentially across industries.

What do you enjoy most about working at Imagination Technologies?

Imagination is a great company, and working here has placed me at the cutting edge of technology. I really enjoy being part of IMGsystems, which is a small team with great ambitions working to build platforms to help our customers bring IoT products to market more quickly. The challenge and learning curve is exciting and has exposed me to both the technical and business challenges of bringing technology to market.

What advice would you give to any young people looking to get into engineering?

Engineering is not only for people who are whizzes at maths and physics. Everything from being creative and having an idea, all the way to making it happen and supporting users is part of Engineering. There are a lot of opportunities for engineers of all different disciplines and backgrounds.

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