2024 FoNS MAD winners take home engineering award

The team of Imperial undergraduates who won the Faculty of Natural Sciences Make-A-Difference (FoNS MAD) contest in 2024 took the first prize in the 2025 Quiet Mark Young Engineers Award, after a final at Westminster Palace on Wednesday 22^nd October.

The Quiet Mark Young Engineers Award recognsies “early-career engineers who are developing innovative, practical solutions to reduce noise pollution and improve sound design,” and have produced “tangible output”. 

Marigold, as the group is known, had won last year’s edition of FoNS MAD, an Imperial-run undergraduate innovation competition, for their exploration of AI-powered solutions to mitigate misophonia, a condition in which certain sounds trigger severe emotional, physiological, and behavioural responses. 

The team, which consists of design engineer Leo Kremer, as well as physiscits Maria Guerrero Jimenez, Mele Gadzama, and Jake Marsh, initially considered developing adapted noise-cancelling headphones. They eventually settled on an AI-powered software capable of filtering specific sounds in online media, and are currently working on a machine learning model that would allow users to remove trigger noises from videos.

“In the future, we imagine Marigold being able to tailor a user’s audio experience, allowing users to filter out distressing noises in real-time,” Leo shared with Imperial News. Maria suggested applications could be found for online lecture recordings.

Following their FoNS-MAD success, in which they secured a £7000 grant to facilitate further research, team Marigold were contacted by the Noise Abatement Society to join the John Connell Awards.

“It was an honour to be win this competition,” Mele told Felix after Marigold won the engineering award. “We’ve very grateful to all our supervisors that have helped us along the way, and can’t wait to continue making Imperial and the Internet at large more inclusive places.” 

In parallel to their engineering work, Marigold is conducting a research project to investigating how misophonia and other sound sensitivities affect students at Imperial, as part of an ongoing Student Shapers project. They are calling for students with sound sensitivities of any kind to reach out.

“For us, students’ experiences and opinions lie at the centre of our project,” Mele told Felix. “Too often, there’ll be a ‘design solution’ for a group of people that hasn’t actually taken their perspective into account. Our project is by students and for students – and anyone else who may find our work useful in their day-to-day lives.”