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Covid-19: UK engineering award for Indian origin expert Ravi Solanki
The President’s Special Awards for Pandemic Service recognises teams, organisations, individuals and projects across specialities, disciplines and career stages within the UK engineering community who have contributed to addressing the challenges of the pandemic.
Ravi Solanki, a doctor working on neurodegenerative diseases, is among 19 individuals and teams selected for awards to honour exceptional achievements in tackling Covid-19 in the UK, the Royal Academy of Engineering announced on Monday.
The President’s Special Awards for Pandemic Service recognises teams, organisations, individuals and projects across specialities, disciplines and career stages within the UK engineering community who have contributed to addressing the challenges of the pandemic.
Solanki and Raymond Siems, an engineer working in machine learning, created in a matter of days a secure website in the early stages of the pandemic to bring together health professionals in the National Health Service (NHS) and members of the public who wanted to help.
The charity organisation Healthcare Extraordinary Response Organisation Education and Support (HEROES) was created by NHS cardiologist Dominic Pimenta, supported by former premiership footballer Joe Cole, and the race to build a secure and functioning website began.
Solanki and Siems started building www.helpthemhelpus.co.uk hours before Cole appeared on television to promote the newly launched charity. The website included a crowd-funding page and resources for NHS staff as well as directing the public to Covid-19 information.
Their website allowed the charity to tap into public sentiment and collect donations quickly so that NHS workers could receive the support they needed when the Covid-19 crisis was at its peak, supporting 90,000 NHS workers in three months.
Jim McDonald, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic is the biggest public health crisis of our time and has presented society with multiple challenges. Engineering expertise and innovation has been central to the global fight to save lives and protect livelihoods”.
“I am also incredibly proud of engineers everywhere who have worked round the clock to maintain essential services, critical supply chains and infrastructure in unprecedented circumstances, using their training and skills to find innovative solutions to a host of problems and to help mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on our daily lives.”
