Celebrating our stars
Health researchers, designs that protect workers’ wellbeing, and a dedicated volunteer were among the winners honoured at this year’s CIEHF Awards. The event recognises and rewards the outstanding people and projects that are helping to make a positive difference through human factors. This year’s awards were announced at a celebratory dinner during the Ergonomics & Human Factors 2026 conference and included honours for every career stage.
Best Student Project was won by Glyn Teale for his University of Edinburgh project called ‘Using case vignettes to study the presence of hindsight and outcome biases in maternity case reviews: a cross-sectional survey’.
The Innovation Award was given to Abdollah Vahedi, an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health and Safety, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran. He developed a passive overhead exoskeleton that tackles a key challenge in the field – delivering effective ergonomic support that’s also affordable, simple and scalable.
Laird Evans was named Volunteer of the Year for his tireless working supporting the Institute over many years and his huge commitment to the profession.
Lead author Marie Ward collected the award for Best Paper published in the journal Ergonomics that contributes to the advancement of the practice of ergonomics, entitled ‘A systems approach to managing the risk of healthcare acquired infection in an acute hospital setting supported by human factors ergonomics, data science, data governance and AI’.
And the Musculoskeletal Disorder Risk Reduction Through Design Award, which the CIEHF jointly supports with the Health & Safety Executive, was won by Thames Valley Air Ambulance in the small and medium enterprise category and MP Coleman Ltd in the overall category. You can find out more about both these winners in an upcoming issue of The Ergonomist.
The Lifetime Achievement Award for Practical Application was given to Professor Bob Stone, who has spent more than four decades pioneering the integration of human factors with virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies.
The final award of the night was the President’s Award, which went to the Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science at the University of the Sunshine Coast, led by Professor Gemma Read and founded by Professor Paul Salmon, presented to team member Samantha Jackson (pictured with Professor Mark Young, Chair of the Honours Committee). Over many years, the Centre has made a major contribution to systems ergonomics through the development of innovative methods such as AcciMap-based approaches, Net-HARMS and Cognitive Work Analysis extensions, significantly advancing the tools available to the discipline.
If you’ve got a human factors hero you want to recognise in next year’s awards, keep an eye on our dedicated webpage to find out the details later this year.