Mediwikis has won the best postgraduate venture at the Santander Universities Enterprise Awards. The collaborative medical education platform helps students to share knowledge and best practice. It won the £20,000 cash prize after beating four other projects in the postgraduate category.

Mediwikis

The free, open access platform is sponsored by the Royal College of Physicians. It allows students to contribute their knowledge by using a modified version the same software behind Wikipedia.

The collaborative hub was launched by Stuart Maitland, a medical student doing a research year in Neuroinformatics at Newcastle University on our Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics MSc.

He was also awarded 'Britain’s Top Real Role Model' in 2013 for the early concept for Mediwikis. Alex Brown is helping develop the website and mobile applications. Alex is a Computing Science and Computer Games Engineering graduate.

Stuart, 22, from Whitley Bay, said: "We're really delighted to have won the Santander University Enterprise Awards. This prize will make an enormous difference to our community, and enable more medical students to collaborate and succeed together."

Rise Up

The Mediwikis team received guidance and support from START UP and from Newcastle Science City. Rise Up is the Newcastle University Careers Service support programme for student and graduate entrepreneurs. The Rise Up team helped Stuart create the marketing plan, refine the strategy and secure funding.

Santander Universities

The Santander Universities Enterprise Awards are funded by the Santander Universities Division. The awards aim to support and encourage university students to pursue their business ideas. The competition is open to students from 78 UK universities partnering with Santander Universities. 

Five postgraduate and five undergraduate projects were chosen and judged by a panel. The judges were members of Santander and several UK universities and business schools.