His Majesty The King presents 2024 and 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prizes for Engineering (QEPrize) at St James's Palace

Today, on National Engineering Day, His Majesty King Charles III presented the 2024 and 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prizes for Engineering (QEPrize) during a ceremony at St James's Palace.

The 2025 Laureates are Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Jensen Huang, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li, honoured for their pioneering contributions to the development of modern machine learning, a field that underpins the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI).

The 2024 QEPrize was presented to Laureates Andrew Garrad and Henrik Stiesdal, both recognised for their transformative innovations in advanced wind turbine technology, which has positioned wind power as a vital component of the world’s renewable energy mix.

Together, the contributions of these nine engineers have laid the foundations for technologies that are transforming the modern world, from machine learning systems driving breakthroughs across industries to wind energy innovations delivering clean power on a global scale. Their achievements demonstrate the enduring power of engineering to shape a smarter and more sustainable future.

The QEPrize is awarded annually to engineers responsible for groundbreaking innovations that have been of global benefit to humanity. Queen Elizabeth II gave the first prize to the developers of the internet and the world wide web in 2013.

Upholding his late mother’s legacy, His Majesty The King presented the Laureates today with trophies designed by young people through the QEPrize’s annual ‘Create the Trophy’ competition. Each year, designers aged 14–24 from around the world submit their own concept for the QEPrize trophy and the winning designs are fabricated and presented to the Laureates. Sunil Thakkar and Prerak Bothra, both from India, developed the striking designs that were chosen for the 2024 and 2025 trophies, respectively.

Lord Vallance, Chair of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, said: “Our 2024 and 2025 Laureates represent the very best of engineering. Together, their work demonstrates how engineering can both sustain our planet and transform the way we live and learn. The ingenuity and dedication of this exceptional group of engineers embody the very essence of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering: innovation that serves humanity and inspires the next generation of global problem-solvers."

Prior to the presentation, the 2024 and 2025 Laureates visited No 10 Downing Street for a roundtable discussion including the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Liz Kendall. The conversation explored recent engineering advances in machine learning and wind energy technologies and how they might inspire the next generation of UK engineering visionaries. The roundtable also marked National Engineering Day in the UK – an annual awareness day to celebrate how engineers shape the future and improve everyday lives.

2025 QEPrize – Modern Machine Learning

The 2025 QEPrize Laureates include Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, and Yann LeCun, who transformed the field of AI through their development and advocacy of artificial neural networks, now the dominant model in machine learning. They were awarded alongside Jensen Huang and Bill Dally who advanced the computing hardware essential to the operation of modern AI systems used today, along with Fei-Fei Li who led efforts to create the high-quality datasets needed to train, evaluate, and benchmark these models effectively.

Professor Yoshua Bengio, 2025 QEPrize laureate, said: “I am deeply honoured to be receiving the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, presented by His Majesty King Charles III. I am also fortunate to receive it alongside an exceptional group of colleagues, whose groundbreaking scientific contributions have had a profound impact on the field of AI. This recognition arrives at a crucial point in time when the technology we contributed to shaping now holds immense promise to help solve some of our greatest collective challenges but also presents major risks. We are truly at a crossroads, and I am hopeful that the choices we collectively make in the coming years will steer us towards safe AI for the benefit of all.”

Dr Yann LeCun, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: "I am deeply honoured to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside my esteemed friends and colleagues. As a scientist, I have always been fascinated by the mystery of intelligence and how it emerges through self-organisation. As an engineer, I have always believed that the best way to understand intelligence is to build an intelligent artifact, or rather, to let it build itself through learning. In the near future, AI assistants will help us in our daily lives and will amplify human intelligence, accelerating progress in science, medicine, and engineering. But much research remains to be done to bring machines to the level of intelligence and learning abilities we observe in animals and humans."

Dr Bill Dally, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: “I am honoured to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside esteemed pioneers in the field of AI. Modern AI is built on the foundation of algorithms, data, and hardware. Decades of research on parallel computing and stream processing paved the way for the development of the GPUs that enabled existing algorithms and data sets to achieve super-human results on many applications. Over the last decade, advances in GPU performance, efficiency, and networking have powered today’s language and diffusion models, driving innovations that enhance the human experience in many ways. We continue to apply engineering methods to refine AI hardware and software so that AI can empower people to achieve even greater things.”

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: “Receiving the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a wonderful honour and recognition of the role engineering plays in advancing society. I hope this award will encourage future innovators to address our world's most pressing challenges including the challenge of making AI safe so that we can all reap its benefits.”

Professor John Hopfield, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: "Being curious about the world is the natural state for children. With support and education, this curiosity can develop an engineer or scientist. Add a sense of social purpose, and you have made a civilization. It is my joy to be honoured with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside six expert engineers who, like me, try to use facts about our brains to make more powerful computers. The facts about the interconnectivity of brain neuroanatomy become the engineer’s structure of artificial neural networks. The synapses which connect a brain cell to others become the adjustable parameters of the programmer. Learning by exploring the environment is replaced by using massive data sets."

Jensen Huang, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: “Engineers are builders of the future. And engineering is the art and science of turning imagination into reality, solving challenges once thought impossible, and uplifting the human condition. I am deeply honoured to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and to be recognised among the pioneers whose work has shaped the world we live in today. This prize has honoured the visionaries who gave us the internet, GPS, digital imaging, and wireless technology—breakthroughs that have transformed industries and everyday life.”

Dr Fei-Fei Li, 2025 QEPrize Laureate, said: “I am deeply honoured to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, especially in such esteemed company alongside my fellow honourees. My life’s work has been dedicated to ensuring that the development of the most impactful technology of our generation benefits humanity. My hope is that this recognition will drive further awareness of the need to continue keeping human values at the centre of AI’s development among engineers, academic researchers, technologists, policymakers and civil society leaders alike to ensure the best future for our children, our parents, for all of us. The profound impact of data will continue to fuel AI’s increasing power and technological capabilities; we’ll be able to use it for more scientific discovery, to make education more personalised, improve health and elder care, empower creators and designers, and address the realities of our changing planet and climate, to name just a few.”

2024 QEPrize – Modern Wind Power Technology

The 2024 QEPrize Laureates, Henrik Stiesdal and Andrew Garrad, have played a pivotal role in advancing wind power from its early experimental stages to the high-performance systems used today. Their pioneering work laid the foundations for the design and operation of almost all modern onshore and offshore wind turbines, shaping the technologies that power the global wind energy industry.

Henrik Stiesdal, 2024 QEPrize Laureate, said: “It is an honour to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside Andrew. To me, it represents much more than personal recognition; it is a tribute to the collective efforts of pioneers and engineers in wind power. Since the late 1970s they embodied the essence of this Prize, creating bold, groundbreaking innovations delivering sustainable and competitive energy, addressing climate change and providing global benefits for humanity. I am very happy to have had the opportunity to contribute to this development, and I look forward with eagerness to the future growth of wind power, driven by the dedication of new generations of engineers.”

Dr Andrew Garrad CBE, 2024 QEPrize Laureate, said: “Wind energy has been with us for millennia, but in the last 50 years, it entered a new era. The 10m diameter turbines of my early professional life have become the 310m giants of today – simply amazing! What could possibly be more exciting for an engineer? I count myself as extraordinarily lucky to have been part of that transition. To be awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a wonderful bonus to an already fascinating career. I am, personally immensely proud, but Henrik and I see ourselves as representatives of a much bigger group of people who have made wind energy an essential part of our zero-carbon future and we have, all of us together, earned this Prize.