In 1959 Sir Alastair Pilkington invented the float glass method of making sheet glass at Pilkington's factory in St Helens. Float glass is one of the hundred most important inventions of the twentieth century and it has transformed the world. Remarkably, Sir Alastair was not a member of the family who owned the Pilkington company, and it was just a coincidence that they shared a surname. Sir Alastair worked his way up the hard way, but such was his ability and determination that within a very few years he was the inventor of the Float Process – hailed as the premier glassmaking invention of the last 100 years! Sir Alastair changed the way the world thinks about glass, so this Award is designed to provide a fitting memorial to an extraordinarily gifted man.

The SGT- Sir Alastair Pilkington Award is designed to encourage and recognise excellent work in glass research or innovation achieved by someone who, like Sir Alastair, has come relatively recently into the field of glass studies.   This Award is not restricted to hard science or engineering – it spans all dimensions of glass studies, creativity and research; glass art as well as glass science, conservation and museum studies as well as engineering, history and design as well as molecular dynamics.

The next Sir Alastair Pilkington Award application round will be in 2026

We invite applications from any field of glass creativity

The winning candidate will receive 1500 Euros and the award is presented at a suitable international conference. Also he or she will receive a smaller replica of the iconic glass sculpture which is the focus in the Award Ceremony. The Award is funded by the Society of Glass Technology and the Mushroom Trust, a fund set up by Sir Alastair’s family.  The Mushroom Trust takes its name from the cover story provided for workers on the secret float furnaces – they were instructed to tell families and friends that they were looking at ways to use the waste heat from the sheet glass furnaces to grow mushrooms!

Rules and Criteria for the Award

In accordance with the Rules of the Society of Glass Technology, the process of judging the submissions and making a decision about which candidate deserves to be the recipient of the Award shall be under the aegis of the Society’s Board of Fellows. The Board may form a sub-committee to consider the entries in detail and make recommendations, to assist the Board in making this Award. The judgement of the Board of Fellows in making this award is final and non-negotiable. If in any given year the Board judges that none of the entries is of sufficiently high standard to merit the Award, then no award will be made that year.

The Rules and Criteria for this Award are:

•  In accordance with the Rules of the Society of Glass Technology, the process of judging the submissions and making a decision about which candidate deserves to be the recipient of the Award shall be under the aegis of the Society’s Board of Fellows. The Board may form a sub-committee to consider the entries in detail and make recommendations, to assist the Board in making this Award. The judgement of the Board of Fellows in making this award is final and non-negotiable. If in any given year the Board judges that none of the entries is of sufficiently high standard to merit the Award, then no award will be made that year.
  
  
  • Applications may be from any glass field, including glass science, technology, history, archæometry, conservation, design, architecture, museology, etc.
  • There is no absolute age limit, but under normal circumstances it is expected that applicants are under 40 years of age (this allows those who come into the glass field later in life to compete). Candidates must demonstrate that they have been employed in the glass field (industry, laboratory, research institute, university, &c.) for no longer than 7 years following training.
  • Each applicant must provide letters of support from three referees. the names, addresses and contact details (telephone numbers and e-mail address) must also be given.
  • An applicant would be expected to provide 3 pieces of documented evidence that their work is new and innovative.  This evidence is expected in the form of: published articles in trade journals, Letters of support from senior industrialists, peer reviewed articles, or articles published in the media to show impact.
  • Each piece of evidence MUST be accompanied by a statement clearly defining the applicant’s contribution. (This is especially important if the applicant is not the first author.) The applicant must understand that the SGT reserves the right to contact any other authors to verify such statements.
  • The documents MUST be in English and be sufficiently well expressed to be readily understandable.
  • Each academic paper MUST have been refereed before publication
  • Each document shall be submitted electronically as a file in pdf format and must correspond to the final printed version.
  • The evidence submitted MUST all have been published within a period not exceeding 7 years.
  • Any given applicant shall be limited to a maximum of 3 attempts as a candidate for this award.
  • In making a submission for this award, each candidate accepts these rules and agrees to be bound by them.
  
  Application form to be emailed to SGT with the subject line
  "Application for the SGT Sir Alastair Pilkington Award"
  

Issued by the Society of Glass Technology, 9 Churchill Way, Chapeltown, Sheffield S35 2PY phone 0114 2634455

 

The Seventh winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award in 2024 was Anoop Krishnan,  Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology.  The award was granted in recognition of his significant developments in introducing Machine Learning, and AI more generally, into the field of glass science."  Dr Krishnan will be giving a awards presentation titled “Combining Machine Learning, Simulations, and Experiments for Improved Glass Design”

 

 

 

 The Sixth winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award in 2022 was Laura Adlington, a Technical Specialist for Strainoptics USA and an independent researcher in Heritage Glass Science.  The award was granted in recognition for the originality and impact of her work in furthering the understanding of archaeological and historical glass monuments such as stained glass windows and mosaics. Dr Adlington was presented with the award at the jointly held 15^th European Society of Glass Conference and the 15^th International Conference on the Structure of Non-Crystalline Materials.  This conference was held from the 15th-19^th July 2024  at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fifth winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award in 2020 was Rob Ireson of Glass Futures Ltd. His submission for the SGT Sir Alastair Pilkington Award related to New ash-based raw materials for decarbonising glass manufacturing.  The presentation was held at  Furnace Solutions 2022 in St Helens

 

 

 

 

 

The fourth winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award in 2018 was Dr Morten Smedskjaer of Aalborg University. His submission for the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington Award related to Pressure-Induced Changes in Interdiffusivity and Compressive Stress in Chemically Strengthened Glass.  The presentation of the prize was held at St Malo PNCS  -ESG Brittany

 

It was a great honor for me to win this award named after Sir Alastair Pilkington, who has had such a great impact on glass technology. Although I don’t do science to win, it is a very nice recognition of my group’s research and I am very thankful to the SGT, on behalf of my whole group, to receive it. We got the award for the research we did related to understanding the densification mechanism of different oxide glasses under high pressure and/or high temperature. Specifically we focused on the pressure-induced coordination number changes of elements such as Al and B. Since the structural response of glasses to high local stress is crucial for their mechanical behaviour, we have later used the obtained knowledge to design novel glass compositions with very high resistances to crack initiation and growth. Currently we trying to incorporate such knowledge in composition-structure-property models to accelerate the design of new glass materials.

 

 

The third winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award was Dr Anita Zeilder of the University of Bath. Her submission for the Pilkington Award related to research work which brought new insights into the structure of glass-forming materials at high pressures and/or high temperatures.  Here again we see the winning candidate receiving her accolade from Ros Christian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The second winner of the SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award was Dr Emma Barney of the University of Nottingham, via Warwick University, and post-doctorate at the ISIS neutron diffraction laboratory. Her submission illustrated her investigations of the short range molecular structure of glasses and related crystal phases to gain an insight into the glass network structure and the relationship between modifier and glass former environments. With a deeper understanding of why changes in glass structure occur with composition and how these changes affect the physical properties of the glasses, it would be possible to design glass compositions that are ideally suited for particular applications. She received her Award from Professor Russell Hand, who was President of the Society of Glass Technology at that time.

It was a great honour to be the recipient of the Pilkington Award in 2014 and I was delighted to go to Parma to accept it and present my work.  My application comprised three papers that outlined my work, up to that point, on the structural role of lone pair cations.  The papers covered: the role thallium plays in a GeO₂ glass network; the structure of α-TeO₂; and the structure of pure-amorphous TeO₂.  I am still very proud of all of these papers; particularly that last one, which sparked some debate in the literature and has resulted in many conversations with eminent researchers in the field as well as ongoing research collaborations.

The SGT Sir Alastair Pilkington award came at a very good time for me.  I had just been appointed as an academic in the Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing department at the University of Nottingham after completing a 2 year Advanced Research Fellowship in the Faculty of Engineering.  At this point I was writing funding applications to continue my research. Being able to go to Parma to present my work and discuss it with peers in the field was a great confidence boost for me and I was awarded a EPSRC First Grant the following year.

 

 

 

 The first SGT Sir Alistair Pilkington award was presented at the ESG, in Maastricht, to Dr John Mauro of Corning, for his invention of an astonishingly strong thin glass suitable for use in the screens of mobile phones and tablets. In this photograph we see Dr Mauro receiving his Award from Ros Christian, Sir Alastair’s daughter.  He later gave a lecture on the research which led to his ground-breaking development.

I received the SGT Sir Alastair Pilkington Award in 2011 in recognition of my research developing new models to predict the properties of glass-forming systems.  This included new models for the temperature and thermal history dependence of viscosity, as well as temperature-dependent constraint theory for predicting the composition dependence of several properties of interest.  I also spent several years developing new energy landscape-based models for studying glass transition and relaxation behavior.  I worked at Corning Incorporated at the time and was trying to straddle both fundamental and applied glass research, i.e., developing new fundamental science and applying it toward the predictive design and understanding of industrial glasses.  Since winning the Pilkington Award, I have designed several new families of industrial glasses for a variety of applications.  In 2017, I left Corning to pursue my love of teaching at Penn State University.  I now have a group of >20 students studying many diverse aspects of experimental and theoretical glass research.  It is truly a joy to help train the next generation of glass scientists.  Every day I am inspired by their passion for glass and desire to help make the world a better place through their research.