Imperial's WE Innovate Team Wins Julia Higgins Medal

Imperial College London's WE Innovate team has been awarded the Julia Higgins Medal, according to a report by Felix, the university's student newspaper.

The medal recognizes the team behind WE Innovate, Imperial's entrepreneurship programme for women. The award citation, as reported by Felix, honors sustained contribution to advancing women in the university community — the specific mandate the Julia Higgins Medal was created to serve.

What the award represents

The Julia Higgins Medal commemorates Dame Julia Higgins, the Imperial College scientist and engineer who served as Principal of the Faculty of Engineering and became one of the most prominent advocates for women in STEM at the institution. The medal bearing her name goes to individuals or teams whose work has measurably improved the position of women at the university.

The WE Innovate programme operates as Imperial's flagship accelerator for female entrepreneurs. It provides coaching, mentoring and funding pathways to women students and researchers building early-stage ventures. The programme culminates each year in a pitch competition, with participants competing for prize money to advance their startups.

By the standards of the medal's purpose — recognizing institutional effort to widen women's participation — the selection of the WE Innovate team rather than a single academic marks a deliberate choice. The award credits a collective, programme-level effort to change outcomes for women at the university.

Why the recognition matters

Honors like the Julia Higgins Medal serve a dual function at universities. They reward past work, and they signal which activities an institution wants more of. Awarding the medal to an entrepreneurship team, rather than solely to classroom or laboratory achievement, places venture-building alongside traditional academic pursuits in the university's official estimation of contribution.

For a programme like WE Innovate, institutional recognition also carries practical weight. University-backed accelerators compete for participants, sponsorships and external partners. A named medal from the institution provides third-party validation that the programme can cite when approaching corporate sponsors and funding partners.

The wider context

University entrepreneurship programmes targeting women have expanded across UK higher education over the past decade, driven by persistent gaps in startup founding rates and venture funding access for women. Programmes at Imperial and peer institutions act as a pipeline: they convert research and student ideas into investable companies while addressing the underrepresentation of women among founder populations.

The award to the WE Innovate team fits that pattern. It directs institutional prestige toward the operational work — mentoring, training, competition organization — that such pipelines require year after year.

What comes next

The Felix report announcing the award does not specify the ceremony date or the individual team members honored. Readers seeking those details, or information on the current WE Innovate cohort and its upcoming pitch competition, can expect further coverage as the university publicizes the award.

The open question is whether the recognition translates into expanded resources. If the medal signals institutional priority, the next measurable indicator will be the scale of the programme's next cohort and the funding available to its winners.