The Henry Royce Institute (Royce) is delighted to announce this year’s winners of the two Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) prizes sponsored by Royce in recognition of the Research Technical Professional (RTP) community.
The Henry Royce Institute Award for Innovation by a Technical Professional is awarded to Dr Gwilherm Kerhervé, Research Facility Manager at the Advanced Photoelectron Spectroscopy Laboratory at Imperial College London.
The award specifically recognises KherveFitting, a free, open-source program Dr Kerhervé developed for analysing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) data, one of the most widely used techniques for studying the chemistry of material surfaces.
XPS probes the outermost few nanometres of a material, the region that governs how it behaves in catalysis, corrosion, electronics, and energy devices. Extracting qualitative and quantitative information from the raw data is the key part of the analysis, and the established software for this task is costly and has a steep learning curve, which puts it out of reach for many students, smaller groups, and researchers in less well-funded institutions.
KherveFitting matches, and in places exceeds, the capabilities of those packages while being free, straightforward to use, and fully transparent in its methods, which matters when software underpins published conclusions. It began as an in-house tool at Imperial and has since become an international resource, with roughly a thousand downloads per month from researchers across some sixty countries.
Commenting on his award, Dr Kerhervé said:
“As the research officer responsible for XPS, I train PhD students and postdocs on data analysis constantly. With the software we used previously, this was a tedious process: slow to teach, slow to use, and the quality of the analysis often suffered as a result. KherveFitting has changed that. The concepts are far easier to explain, students become productive much faster, and work that once took hours is done in a fraction of the time. Making rigorous XPS analysis free and accessible removes a barrier for researchers everywhere, and it is enormously rewarding to see that recognised.”
The Henry Royce Institute Award for Outstanding Contribution by a Technical Professional is awarded to Dr Keith Yendall, Loughborough Materials Characterisation Centre (LMCC) Manager at Loughborough University.
Dr Yendall completed his mathematics and physics degree, PhD and post-doctoral positions at Loughborough before moving to a permanent position at the University. He is now the Centre Manager at Loughborough Materials Characterisation Centre (LMCC) which is a core research and enterprise facility, housed within the Department of Materials, supporting teaching and research across the University. His work also involves leading short- and long-term research and consultancy projects with collaborators across the UK and overseas. This has included many HEIs, research agencies and a large range of industrial companies from SMEs to multinational partners.
Specialising in electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and surface characterisation, he is passionate in sharing this knowledge and tries to encourage as much hands-on practical experience of operating the equipment as possible. By doing so, this empowers the students and researchers, giving them full ownership of their data and research outputs. This also extends to staff members, having trained several apprentices and placement students over the years, sometimes watching over them as one-time apprentices further their careers at the University.
Upon receiving news of his award, Dr Yendall commented:
“I’m incredibly honoured to be recognised for this prestigious award as a research technical professional and thankful to have such a strong and able team around me. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at Loughborough for an extended period of time but looking around, I guess, it could be classed that I’m part of the furniture!!”
Stuart Kitney, Chief Technology Officer at the Henry Royce Institute, said:
“Huge congratulations to Gwilherm and Keith, two richly deserved wins. These prizes matter because they point to something true right across the UK materials community: the research facilities and expertise this country relies on are delivered by Research Technical Professionals, not just the equipment they operate.
Gwilherm has taken a tool built to solve a problem in his own lab and turned it into infrastructure the international XPS community now depends on. Keith has spent years building the people around him as much as the instruments, training researchers and technical staff who carry that expertise forward. Neither contribution shows up on an equipment inventory, but they are exactly what makes advanced materials research possible at national scale. RTPs are the people who make research facilities work, and who bring the expertise inside them to life. Royce is proud to sponsor these prizes in recognition of that.”
Breadth of expertise
Alongside the recipients of the Royce-sponsored Technical Professional Awards, we’re delighted to announced that two further Royce colleagues have received prestigious IOM3 awards.
The 2025 Harvey Flower Titanium Prize (Retrospective) has been awarded to Professor João Quinta da Fonseca, University of Manchester and Royce Research Area Lead for Modelling and Simulation, while the Stokowiec Medal which recognises distinguished work related to alloy steels, has been awarded to Dr Bradley Wynn MIMMM Partner Lead at Royce Partner University, the University of Strathclyde and Director of the Advanced Forming Research Centre. Their achievements further highlight the outstanding contributions of researchers and technical leaders across the Royce partnership.
Congratulations to Dr Kerhervé, Dr Yendall, Professor Quinta da Fonseca and Dr Wynn on their well-deserved recognition in this year’s IOM3 Awards!
Read more about Royce’s support of the RTP community, including the IOM3 Prizes Royce sponsors here.
