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SENSE UK Space Agency Prizes 2026

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We are delighted to announce our third SENSE annual prize winners for Cohort 3. This year’s prizes were sponsored by the UK Space Agency. Whilst we wish we could recognise all our amazing students’ achievements, the SENSE prizes were created to recognise students who have gone above and beyond in different areas during their PhDs. Thank you to those who provided nominations, providing a challenge for the panel to select the winners. 

  • Best Outreach: Leam Howe 
  • Best External Engagement: Elle Smith 
  • Best Paper: Ryan Ing 

Leam Howe – Outreach  

Leam Howe‘s outreach contributions have had a lasting impact both within and beyond the geoscience community. He has played a central role in SatSchool, contributing to the development and delivery of accessible satellite education resources, serving as President in his third year, and ensuring the group’s materials achieved national reach through platforms such as the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Youth Hub via UKSA. Notably, Leam has remained actively engaged even in the final stages of his PhD, supporting continuity and mentoring newer members. 

In parallel, Leam has been a key founder and driving force behind ML4GEO, a student-led seminar and training initiative bringing together researchers across geosciences to explore practical machine learning applications. His leadership helped secure funding, enabling the creation of high‑quality tutorials and the delivery of a successful cross‑disciplinary hackathon on geospatial foundation models. 

Across all activities, Leam demonstrates sustained commitment, inclusive leadership, and a talent for building collaborative outreach that meaningfully supports the wider research community. 

Elle Smith – External Engagement  

Elle Smith‘s research exemplifies outstanding external engagement and real‑world impact. Throughout her PhD, Elle has led and sustained collaborations with a wide range of external partners, including the National Library of Scotland, Forest Research, and the White Rose Forest, ensuring her work directly informs practice, policy, and public understanding.  

Elle’s research on urban trees and access to green space has combined cutting‑edge spatial analysis with clear, accessible communication for non‑academic audiences leading to two publications. Her work has been translated into interactive tools, practitioner‑focused outputs, public talks and webinars, and widely covered media pieces, supporting decision‑makers across local and regional government. You can see more of Elle’s excellent work through the first and second papers of her PhD, presenting her work at the Trees and Design Action Group / Mersey Forest Ideas Lab, her winning of an Early Career Research Prize and being covered by the Yorkshire Post, and others. Elle co-wrote a blog with colleagues at Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF) to explain how the findings of her work related specifically to Leeds, York, Wakefield and Bradford. As part of the ongoing collaboration, Elle is delivering a joint Green Streets webinar for practitioners and policy makers in the region. Through her leadership, technical expertise, and commitment to meaningful collaboration, Elle has ensured that her research delivers tangible benefits beyond academia. 

Ryan Ing – Best Paper  

Ryan Ing‘s award-winning paper, Minimal Impact of Late-Season Melt Events on Greenland Ice Sheet Annual Motion (published in Geophysical Research Letters), investigates the ice-dynamic response to the largest late-season surface melt event ever recorded on the Greenland Ice Sheet. 

Led entirely by Ryan, from conceptual development and data analysis to manuscript preparation, the research reveals that while extreme late-season melt events trigger short-lived and dramatic speed-ups in ice flow, their overall impact on annual ice discharge is minimal. Crucially, the study highlights that such events can nevertheless drive substantial increases in surface meltwater runoff, with significant implications for future ice-sheet mass loss under a warming climate. 

The paper has already attracted wide academic and public attention, with citations in high-impact journals including Nature Communications, Nature Reviews, and Geophysical Research Letters, as well as coverage by phys.org. Ryan’s work represents an important contribution to understanding Greenland Ice Sheet dynamics and its future contribution to sea-level rise. 

Xinyi Huang – Commendation for Best Paper  

We’d also like to commend Xinyi Huang for her outstanding paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (2025), which makes a significant and original contribution to understanding mixed‑phase cloud processes. Led entirely by the nominee, the work uses innovative high‑resolution modelling and satellite observations to overturn established assumptions about how ice nucleation affects cloud reflectivity. This research has important implications for climate model representation of cloud feedbacks and exemplifies the high-quality, impactful science supported by the SENSE CDT. 

Find out more about our outstanding students on the SENSE website. 

We look forward to seeing the nominations for next year and once again congratulate this year’s winners and all our SENSE students for all their amazing achievements!