Trinity student Tony Zhang receives new Engineering prize

Tony Zhang, a first-year Engineering undergraduate at Trinity , is one of the recipients of the new Arthur Shercliff Prizes – established in honour of Professor Arthur Shercliff, former Head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge.

Tony (pictured above) was one of four students to receive the Arthur Shercliff Tripos Prizes, which recognise outstanding achievement in the first year of Engineering. Recipients are selected by the examiners based on examination performance. Tony said:

Receiving the Arthur Shercliff Tripos Prize feels like both encouragement and recognition of my efforts. It gives me extra motivation to keep pushing forward and to contribute more to engineering at Trinity and beyond.

The other recipients are Alex Momoiu, at Jesus College, Joe Tait, at St Catharine’s College, and Jia Xuan Tan, at Christ’s College.

Trinity Fellow and Director of Studies in Engineering Professor Hugh Hunt (pictured above) congratulated Tony.

It’s quite an achievement, to be at the top of 341 first-year engineering students. In our Supervisions Tony has really shown himself to be a deserving recipient. I really hope that Tony will inspire other Trinity students to go on to win this prize in the future.

In addition to the Tripos Prizes, the Arthur Shercliff Design Project Prizes were awarded to 15 students from the top two teams in the Part IA Design Project. This project saw students on the Cambridge Product Design course compete at the 2025 Grand Finals of the Engineering for People Design Challenge, where students work collaboratively to propose sustainable solutions to real-world engineering issues within a specific geographic context.

The Arthur Shercliff Prizes represent a new chapter for the Arthur Shercliff Memorial Trust, which was founded in 1984 following Professor Shercliff’s death. For nearly four decades the Trust supported scholarships for technical visits abroad for students at Cambridge and Warwick. With international opportunities now more common, the fund has been re-purposed to reward excellence in undergraduate engineering studies.

Professor Shercliff was renowned for his dedication to undergraduate teaching, pioneering curriculum design, and his emphasis on strong mathematical foundations within the engineering course. The establishment of the prize in his name seeks to preserve and celebrate that legacy.