2025: A look back

In early February at the Science Museum in London our 2025 QEPrize Laureates were announced. In the presence of HRH The Princess Royal, QEPrize Chair of Trustees Lord Vallance of Balham revealed that Dr Bill Dally, Dr Fei-Fei Li, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Jensen Huang, Professor John Hopfield, Dr Yann LeCun, and Professor Yoshua Bengio were awarded the prize for their seminal contributions to the development of Modern Machine Learning, a core component of artificial intelligence (AI) advancements. 

Read more about this incredible innovation in our website. You can also view more images from our winner announcement event in our event gallery.

In October, the QEPrize team along with Royal Academy of Engineering colleagues went to California for a celebration of engineering innovation, global collaboration, and visionary leadership. One highlight of the trip was the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Laureate Reception, hosted at NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art headquarters in Santa Clara. 

Alongside QEPrize CEO Dr Hayaatun Sillem, Royal Academy of Engineering President Sir John Lazar, and UK Consul-General for California Eleanor Kiloh, we explored NVIDIA’s demo lab and autonomous vehicle garage - an inspiring showcase of how AI reasoning models are delivering real-world impact.

Read more about the trip to California in our blog.

On this year's National Engineering Day our 2024 and 2025 QEPrize Laureates gathered at Downing Street for a thought-provoking roundtable on “Creating the Next Generation of UK Engineering Visionaries.”

The discussion was hosted by Lord Vallance of Balham, Chair of the QEPrize Trustees, alongside Liz Kendall, Minister of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. Together they brought together some of the brightest minds in engineering to explore how the UK can cultivate future leaders by expanding access to the profession, embracing diversity, and accelerating innovation. Among the attendees were QEPrize Laureates and ambassadors.

Following the Presentation, guests continued with dinner inside St James’s Palace. The evening offered a memorable chance to hear directly from our 2024 and 2025 Laureates as they spoke about their groundbreaking work, the significance of being recognised with the QEPrize, and the privilege of meeting His Majesty The King. It was also a milestone moment for the 2025 Laureates as it was the very first time all of them had gathered the same room!

To round up our year, our final activity saw some of our QEPrize Ambassadors attend the Science Museum’s STEM Skills Fair, engaging young people through interactive activities and thought‑provoking panel discussions designed to inspire and strengthen their STEM knowledge. Students had the chance to connect directly with our ambassadors, learning more about the QEPrize and the Create the Trophy competition, while also exploring what a future in engineering might look like. It was fantastic to see so many students actively participating, showing curiosity, and asking insightful questions about the ambassadors’ experiences and career journeys in engineering.

A massive thank you to our QEPrize Ambassadors who volunteered on the day to bring the wonder of engineering to so many attendees! You can read more about that brilliant day in our recent blog post.