Dr Hunt said: "To have won this year's Rooke Award for doing something that I enjoy so much is incredibly rewarding. Very often, engineers are in the background, just getting on with things, but to inspire the next generation we need to be front-and-centre. As well as being vital to our future, science, technology, engineering and maths are incredibly good fun and I love showing people that."
Dr Hunt's activities are wide and varied – he has long been a stalwart of the Cambridge undergraduate engineering teaching programme, as well as a regular contributor to the university's popular science lectures. Through these activities, Dr Hunt has inspired many thousands of people on topics as diverse as the science of music to the mechanics of gyroscopes and boomerangs.
He has hosted the Institute of Physics School Teachers' Update Courses in Cambridge, appeared at the Cheltenham Science Festival and also makes regular appearances on the BBC's Naked Scientists radio show.
In addition, Dr Hunt has created and presented television documentaries with a strong engineering component, including Attack of the Zeppelins, Escape from Colditz, Digging the Great Escape and Dambusters: Building the Bouncing Bomb, for which he won the 2011 Royal Television Society award for the best history programme.
Professor David Cardwell FREng, Head of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, said: "His constant drive and boundless enthusiasm for his subject has inspired a generation of budding engineers. He is simply an extraordinary communicator who fully deserves to be the recipient of this year's Rooke Award".
