Mandy Chessell, a WebSphere Architect at IBM's UK Development Laboratory at Hursley Park, has become the first woman to win the Royal Academy of Engineering's prestigious Silver Medal for her outstanding contribution to British engineering.

HRH the Duke of Edinburgh made the award at a special ceremony at the academy's annual general meeting in London.

Mandy, 36, specialises in developing middleware - the invisible software that enables different computer programs to talk to each other.

Her most important project is the code behind WebSphere business Process Beans, a middleware system that enables companies to connect their existing systems together so they can act as one system. She leads the Hursley Master Inventors team - a group of people with outstanding innovation records, whose role is to encourage creativity throughout the Laboratory.

In her 14 years with IBM she has developed new engineering practices that have transformed the cost, reliability and time-to-market of e-business software.

Her name is already on 25 patents and colleagues say her work is as significant in its own way as Java or the World Wide Web.

Mandy has tackled a problem studied by mathematician Ian Stewart - the more detailed the design the greater the chances that major design flaws will go unnoticed. "It's a bit like finding your way through a maze," she said. "We're building relationships between different pieces of program written by different people at different times. Our systems create a kind of map to help people organise their programs instead of getting lost in the detail."

Technology Review magazine last year voted her as one of its TR100 group of people aged under 35 who are most likely to make significant technical innovations in the 21st century. She also reached the final of the Cosmopolitan Women of Achievement Awards 2000.

But she still finds time for less technical pursuits, like climbing Kilimanjaro and visiting mountain gorillas in Uganda.