3 Students Set Up Science Journalism Contest, With One Using Scholarship Funds for Prize Money

In many scientific papers, the term "macroautophagy" had been described as "the sequestration of cytoplasmic material in double-membrane vesicles, which later fuse with lysosomes for the digestion of luminal content".

- Zachary Lim

But when a fellow schoolmate rephrased it as "the intentional 'self-eating' and destruction of organelles by a cell," the idea of having a science journalism competition came to a group of Raffles Institution (RI) students.

The brainchild of Elijah Chew, 17, and two of his schoolmates at RI, the inaugural Singapore Biology Reporting Challenge 2025 is open to students from secondary schools, junior colleges and polytechnics.

The winner, runner-up and second runner-up will walk away with $50, $30 and $20 respectively. The money will come from Elijah's scholarship stipend.

Elijah said he felt that more accessible content is needed to motivate students to be interested in science journals. And he believes a competition for science journalism could promote better science storytelling.

While Elijah and the competition's other co-founders—Nathan Lee, 16, and Chiu Yee Seen, 17—understand that scientific papers must be as precise and complete as possible, they are mostly obscure, esoteric and inaccessible for many readers.

"Reading scholarly work is greatly beneficial to life in general. Being able to pick out flaws in reasoning and affirm strong hypotheses can help protect readers from misleading information," said Elijah.