Engineer Lachlan Blackhall wins Batterham Medal

The Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering (ATSE) has named Dr Lachlan Blackhall as the inaugural winner of its new Batterham Medal award for promising early-career engineers.

Blackhall is a PhD graduate from the ANU who went on to co-found Reposit Power, a technology company designing advanced control systems for grid-deployed energy storage.

The systems being designed by the company are the world’s first systems capable of trading distributed stored solar energy between utilities. He is serving as CTO of the company.

During his time in academia Blackhall received multiple honours, including two major international prizes for his PhD research.

These were the IFAC World Congress Young Author Prize in 2008 and the IFAC Workshop on Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems Best Student Paper Award in 2010.

The Batterham Medal will be awarded annually to engineers early in their professional lives who have already achieved substantial peer and industry recognition for their work in the past five years.

It is named after Professor Robin Batterham AO, the Kernot Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne and former Chief Scientist of Australia. Batterham presented the medal to Blackhall at the ATSE’s Oration Dinner on Friday.