Jess Wade

Early life and education Wade is the daughter of two physicians. She was privately educated at South Hampstead High School, graduating in 2007. Wade subsequently enrolled in a foundation course in art and design at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, In 2022, Wade and coworkers published a paper on their discovery of how to template chiral materials at functional interfaces.

, according to Web of Science, she has published 59 items and been cited 1,124 times.

Public engagement Wade has contributed to public engagement to increase gender equality in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. She represented the UK on the United States Department of State funded International Visitor Leadership Program Hidden No More,

Wade serves on the IOP London and South East Committee, New Scientist, and The Guardian. With Ben Britton and Christopher Jackson, she co-authored "The reward and risk of social media for academics" in the journal Nature Reviews Chemistry. In May 2025, Wade was a guest panellist on the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, in an episode discussing the physicist Lise Meitner.

Wikipedia contributions

Wade has made a large contribution to a Wikipedia campaign that encourages the creation of Wikipedia articles about notable female academics, in order to promote female role models in STEM. As of February 2020, she had written over 900 biographies on Wikipedia. By January 2021, this figure had risen to 1,200.

On 12 April 2019, The Washington Post published an op-ed titled "The black hole photo is just one example of championing women in science", co-authored by Zaringhalam and Wade, advocating for increased recognition for women who contribute to science. After the first image of a black hole was released, media coverage celebrated Katie Bouman's role leading the creation of the image processing algorithm. The op-ed emphasized the power of social media like Twitter and collaborative information repositories like Wikipedia for crediting women's scientific contributions.

As an example of insufficient coverage in the English-language Wikipedia of women in science, the article points to the deletion of the biography of Clarice Phelps. Wade created a short Wikipedia biography of Phelps in September 2018. The deletion of that article on 11 February 2019 led to a prolonged editorial discussion and its repeated restoration and re-deletion. Katrina Krämer wrote in Chemistry World:

Wade told Chemistry World she believes such omissions of scientific researchers from coverage in Wikipedia are regrettable, stating her impression that it accepts entries for even the most obscure popular-media figures. As of 2019, of the 600 articles about female scientists Wade had written, 6 had been deleted for not meeting Wikipedia's criteria for notability. She received an honourable mention in the Wikimedian of the Year award by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, for her "year long effort to write about underrepresented scientists and engineers on Wikipedia",

Wade was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to gender diversity in science. Her employer honoured her that year with its Leadership Award for Societal Engagement. Also in 2019, Wade was named as the 44th "Most Influential Woman in UK Tech" by Computer Weekly. During the same year, Casio released a scientific calculator in Spain bearing Wade's picture in a series of 12 calculators commemorating historically notable female scientists.

In 2023, she was one of the six women chosen by Nature to comment on their plans for International Women's Day. The others were Gihan Kamel, Martina Anto-Ocrah, Sandra Diaz, Aster Gebrekirstos and Tanya Monro. Also in 2023, Wade was awarded the President’s Medal for Outreach from Imperial College London for her work in promoting diversity in STEM.

In 2024, Wade received a University Research Fellowship and the Rosalind Franklin Award from the Royal Society for "her achievements in functional materials and outstanding project which will support early career women scientists to pursue academic careers in materials sciences".

In 2025, she was elected as a Fellow of SPIE.