Neil Doherty came to us with no experience of additive manufacturing. Three years later he won the 2026 TCT Rising Star Award — the youngest recipient in its history.
Neil Doherty, age 14
SMF Rising Star Award, TCT Awards 2026
Youngest winner to date
Youth Training, St Austell HQ
There is a version of 3D printing education that stops at the machine. A printer arrives, a file is downloaded, a button is pressed, and something appears. It is a good demonstration and a poor education, because it teaches the one part of the process that is already automated.
3D Printing Cornwall has taught additive manufacturing since 2016, and our approach runs the other way round. Our day job is consulting and manufacturing for commercial clients across the UK. The training programme opens that same workshop, and the same commercial-grade equipment, to students aged twelve and up.
Learners work the full arc — scanning a physical object, preparing and managing files, running professional machines, and post-processing a part until it is genuinely client-ready. Students are not shown a finished process; they are taken through the decisions inside it.
The difference that makes is hard to argue in the abstract and easy to demonstrate with a single student.
Neil arrived as a complete beginner, with no prior experience of additive manufacturing, CAD, or the workflow connecting them. Nothing about the starting point was unusual. What followed was.
Students train on the machinery used in live client work rather than on a hobby kit, covering FDM, resin and SLS processes alongside the material properties that decide which one suits a given job. Learning on production equipment means the habits formed are the habits the industry actually uses.
The programme covers digitising physical objects into workable meshes, preparing and slicing files, and understanding what will succeed on a real machine rather than what merely looks correct on screen. This is the gap where most self-taught learning stalls, and it is the part a user manual cannot close.
The turning point was commercial rather than technical. Neil moved from producing parts to designing and selling his own products — and they are now in use in local businesses, which is a harder test than any exam. It demanded design judgement, a read on what people would actually pay for, and the finishing standards that separate a saleable object from a printed one.
Progress of this kind does not come from a syllabus. It comes from working alongside people doing the job commercially, being asked why a decision was made, and being held to a standard rather than marked against an exercise.
Each year the Sanjay Mortimer Foundation goes looking for a young person who might just change engineering, and specifically for a neurodivergent one. The Foundation — a registered charity named for a much-loved figure in British 3D printing — exists because the qualities the industry says it values most, creativity and lateral thinking and a willingness to try the thing nobody has tried, turn up in neurodivergent minds all the time. And yet those minds stay badly underrepresented across engineering.
Neil won that award in 2026, at fourteen: the youngest recipient in its history. What the judges recognised is what we had watched happen over three years — a beginner who became a designer, then a maker, then someone whose products are in use in local businesses. He went home with a Prusa CORE One+ and a place among the SMF Stars, with grants, training and mentorship behind him as he keeps going.
We would love to take the credit. In truth we opened the workshop door, put real equipment in front of him, and got out of the way.
TCT Rising Star Award
Age at winning — youngest to date
Years from first print to national award
— Michael Hunt, 3D Printing Consultant, 3D Printing Cornwall
As TCT Magazine reported, through mentorship from 3D Printing Cornwall Neil grew from complete beginner to creating and selling his own designs locally.
For schools, the relevant point is not the trophy. It is that a fourteen-year-old with no starting knowledge reached a nationally recognised standard through structured mentorship on professional equipment.
That says something about the teaching model, and something about what becomes available to pupils whose schools build a genuine additive manufacturing capability rather than buying a printer and hoping it gets used.
We support schools with staff training and CPD, curriculum integration mapped to D&T and Computing, equipment selection, and visits to our St Austell workshop.
TCT Magazine, TCT and SMF introduce next 3D printing Rising Star | Sanjay Mortimer Foundation, TCT Rising Star Award | 3DPC Youth Training and 3D Printing for Schools
Staff CPD, curriculum integration, equipment selection and workshop visits — delivered by people who manufacture commercially every day.
