We are delighted to announce the winner of this year’s CoSeC Impact Award.
Following a panel process, CoSeC have awarded the 2026 CoSeC Impact Award to Mr Sunday Nwokolo, Bangor University for his exceptional contributions to the scientific community.
The CoSeC Impact Award recognizes individuals whose work has significant impact for computational research, in close collaboration with CoSeC and the communities we collaborate with.
X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT) produces 3D images of the inside of an object without damaging it and is used in medicine for diagnosis and manufacturing for potential defects. One common problem in XCT of dense parts and multi-material objects is “beam hardening”, a distortion that blurs details, reduces accuracy and even adding features on the images that do not exist in the objects. Mr Nwokolo’s doctoral research addresses this gap with the Beam Hardening Predictive Index (BHPI), a metric to predict beam hardening severity before a scan is run.
With the support of the CCPi community, Mr Nwokolo has built a closed-loop optimisation pipeline around this metric that sweeps thousands of tube voltage and filter combinations in simulation, using gVirtualXRay (gVXR), CCPi’s X-ray simulator, and its digital twins of scanners. It predicts each setting’s outcome and the resulting scans were reconstructed using CCPi’s Core Imaging Library (CIL).
Mr Nwokolo says, “I am honoured to receive the 2026 CoSeC Impact Award. The Beam Hardening Predictive Index (BHPI) grew from a simple question: can we predict and plan around beam hardening before a scan is taken, rather than correcting for it afterwards? Getting there depended entirely on the open tools and the community behind them, gVirtualXRay and the Core Imaging Library (CIL), and on the support of CCPi and CoSeC. I am grateful to my supervisor, Franck Vidal, STFC to Jean-Michel Létang, INSA Lyon, and to all my collaborators, and I hope BHPI proves genuinely useful across the many fields that rely on X-ray CT.”
The panel selected Mr Nwokolo as he has clearly made excellent progress as an early-career researcher with strong letters of support by many collaborators. In developing the BHPI, Mr Nwokolo has created “a highly useful pre-assessment tool for a wide range of applications in X-ray tomography, that will have significant impact and play a central role for computational science in enabling practical advances in XCT.”
CoSeC Director Dr Stephen Longshaw adds, “Many congratulations to Mr Nwokolo who will be presented with the Impact Award at a future CoSeC event. Now in its 7th year, this award recognises individuals who have contributed to the research software infrastructure that underpins the outputs of whole communities. The enabling nature of this work means that it has importance for not just the CCPi community but also those that rely on these imaging techniques to understand their data and create wider research impact in areas like life sciences or advanced manufacturing.”