Tom Timson wins Digital Excellence Award at Ricardo Leading Lights Awards 2023

For his outstanding work leading the development and deployment of our extended reality tools, VR and AR Engineer Tom Timson has been named the winner of the Digital Excellence Award at the 2023 Ricardo Leading Lights Awards.

Through his use of extended reality tools, Tom routinely enables our clients to gain an enriched understanding of the solutions we are providing to them. This is particularly in relation to leading-edge research and development (R&D) work and infrastructure programmes where it is essential to bring to life in the near-term projects which are very much long-term in implementation - in the process significantly enhancing understanding for stakeholders at all levels from a technician up to c-suite.

Leading Lights is the annual Ricardo awards ceremony which recognises and rewards the impressive work our teams undertake to go above and beyond for clients in their day-to-day roles. The Digital Excellence Award highlights significant value creation through enhanced commercial digital offerings.

Tom was recognised for his achievement for creating extended reality (XR) walk-throughs for some of our key projects. For example, to support our work on a high profile, community-scale greenhouse gas removal and clean energy project, we were able to walk our monitoring officer from the UK Government department which is providing innovation funding, through an ‘empty building’ using mixed reality (MR) to fill the room with the proposed design

This really brought to life the planned plant and allowed the UK Government to see where their money was going. The monitoring officer’s response was that he thought it was brilliant and all infrastructure projects should be required to produce a MR experience as part of the delivery. We have since used the same technology in multiple projects.

Tom’s career is a great example of the commitment that Ricardo has to inspiring and nurturing the next generation of scientists, engineers and technologists. Tom first came to Ricardo for work experience as a teenager, then undertook his undergraduate year in industry at Ricardo, and subsequently joined the Ricardo graduate scheme once he had completed his studies in engineering at university. Tom has now been part of Ricardo for 13 years and having been mentored throughout his time at the company, earlier this year became a mentor himself, brilliantly guiding, inspiring and nurturing an undergraduate to great effect.

Describing how he felt to have been recognised at the Leading Lights, Tom said: “Being awarded the digital excellence award is a delight. This year we’ve had some fantastic moments with the use of our tools on some incredible projects, so for that to be recognised with an award brings a great deal of satisfaction.”