Nazish Aslam, a student from the Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI), has won Student Engineer of the Year at the Elektra Awards, which were presented recently in Munich, Germany. This is the second year in a row that a student from iSLI has won the prestigious award, beating off competition from students at academic institutions all over Europe.
Miss Aslam is currently studying at iSLI for an Engineering Doctorate (EngD), the flagship doctoral qualification of the UK government-funded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The EngD pairs a student with a sponsoring company to develop innovative, commercially relevant, research projects led by the company and supervised by academic and industrial tutors. The student gains PhD-level skills in a commercial environment and the sponsor owns the generated IP.
Aslam achieved an average mark of over 70 percent and progressed to the research phase with her sponsor, Spiral Gateway Ltd., a fabless semiconductor chip vendor, headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland. For the past three and a half years, all of Aslam’s work has been of immediate relevance to her sponsor, which is providing a new, state-of-the-art dynamically reconfigurable platform to replace ASICs in many cost-sensitive mobile multimedia products.
Aslam commented, "The concentration of high quality universities makes central Scotland a fertile breeding ground for semiconductor start-up companies, in which keen and able students can excel. I'm proud to be marked out as one of them by winning this award."
