Awarding excellence: Siemens’ James Pickford wins BrightSparks award
The BrightSparks award recognizes young innovators and changemakers in the industry.
Each December at the glitzy Elektra Awards night, Electronics Weekly bestows the BrightSparks awards to recognize outstanding young engineers who are making an impact in the UK. This year, among the winning engineers was Siemens EDA full-time software intern James Pickford.
The BrightSparks award program is in its sixth year. It recognized engineers aged 30 or younger who are in the first years of their careers or are still studying in the UK but have already shown innovation in the semiconductor or electronics industry.
The award was highly competitive for 2023, which many impressive nominees. The winners were chosen by the Electronics Weekly editorial team, a group of quite accomplished engineers and academics.
James Pickford earned his Master of Engineering in computer science from the University of Southampton and has been a full-time student software engineer intern at Siemens EDA in Cambridge, England since August 2022. James’ work at Siemens EDA is within the Tessent Silicon Lifecycle Solutions group, where he is focused on a developing a hardware based cyber-security solution for connected vehicles. James is involved with everything from initial security attach profiles to the embedded software to drive the hardware components.
James is also known for his excellent communication and presentation skills which he uses to explain complex engineering problems and solutions to a wide audience. His recent publications include a technical paper at SAE World Congress, “Hardware-Based Cyber Security for Connected Vehicles,” co-authored with Lee Harrison.
To learn more about this work, download a related technical paper from Siemens, Cybersecurity: the case for hardware-based threat detection and mitigation.
