The Gold Medal is the Institution’s highest individual honour.
The 2026 Gold Medal has been awarded to Tina Vejrum, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the design and delivery of major long-span bridges and complex infrastructure projects worldwide. She has provided significant contributions to landmark schemes as well as to concept development for floating cable-supported bridges, demonstrating exceptional expertise in bridge aerodynamics, wind engineering and structural behaviour. Through her leadership of multidisciplinary teams and her contribution to international committees and professional bodies, she has advanced engineering practice and influenced bridge design and delivery on a global scale.
Tina's presentation Learnings from record bridges explores how landmark projects including the Great Belt Fixed Link in Denmark, the Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong and the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey have driven advances in bridge engineering through challenging conditions such as extreme winds, powerful currents, heavy maritime traffic and deep-water construction.
Drawing on her long career with COWI, Tina will demonstrate how each record-breaking structure has built on the last in terms of technology and methods. She will then look ahead to the Ferry Free E39 project in Norway, where floating structures are being considered to support roadways across water depths of more than 500m. She will also reflect on the links between her career as a bridge engineer and her involvement in professional associations including IStructE and as IABSE President from 2022 to 2025.
The address will be hosted by the Institution's 2026 President Brian Uy and the Chief Executive Yasmin Becker.
For those attending in-person, refreshments will be served from 17:30 BST on arrival and the address will be followed by a networking drinks and canapé reception.
About Tina Vejrum
Tina Vejrum is Senior Technical Director in COWI and has been working on international infrastructure projects for 30 years. After completing her PhD, she started her career as a structural engineer on the Great Belt Fixed Link in Denmark. A highlight in Tina's career as a bridge engineer is the record span Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong SAR – a project she worked on for 10 years from the design competition through detailed design and concluding with three years on site during construction. She has subsequently been involved in major landmark schemes including the world record span 1915 Çanakkale Bridge and concept development for floating cable-supported bridges. Today she is responsible for technical development in COWI's international team of structural engineers working on some of the largest and most complex infrastructure projects in the world. In parallel, Tina is Affiliated Professor at the Technical University of Denmark, on the Board of Directors of the COWI Foundation and active in a number of professional associations, notably the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE), where she served as the President from 2022 to 2025.