Trinity student part of team behind Ictus's £10,000 win at StEP Demo Day

Catherine McMullan, a History undergraduate at Trinity College, is part of the five-student team behind Ictus, which won the £10,000 top prize at StEP's 2026 Demo Day last month. The startup is developing a wearable device for low-cost epileptic seizure detection. In the interdisciplinary team, Catherine is joined by Engineering Science undergraduates Elizaveta Verzhbitskaya and Vivian Lui, Biology undergraduate Nancy Locke and Nanotechnology postgraduate Arya Navab.

StEP is an eight-week educational accelerator run jointly by Oxford Edge and Oxford University Innovation, designed to introduce Oxford students to entrepreneurship and develop the skills they need to start a venture of their own. Catherine and her teammates worked through the fundamentals of building a business, from market sizing to fundraising, received expert mentoring, and heard from Oxford alumni who have gone on to found companies.

At Demo Day, held on Thursday 20 August at the Life and Mind Building, nine teams pitched in front of a judging panel of academic and industry leaders. Ictus took the top prize ahead of runners-up Cloq, developing miniaturised, low-cost quantum clocks, and Vivoxa, a portable diagnostics platform.

Reflecting on the team’s achievement, Catherine said: 'Developing Ictus from a vague idea into a winning proposal was a challenging experience and opened my eyes to the amount of hard work that goes into building a startup. Working with my team of scientists taught me a lot about the need for diversity of thought when problem solving, and it was especially rewarding to meet patients whose lives could really benefit from our device.’

Ictus went on to take part in the Reuben Entrepreneurship Forum a few weeks later, following their StEP win.