Over the last six months, three undergraduate Special Programme in Science students, Chin Zhen Jie, Andrew Teoh, and Cheng Jun Yuan (pictured left to right, below), have been conducting a project in our lab for their Integrated Science Project. They built a computational model to explore the joint effect of stage structure and conspecific negative density dependence on forest tree biodiversity. Their main result was that stage structure enhanced the diversity generated by density dependence. They recently completed their report, underwent a viva voce, gave a poster presentation, and gave a slide presentation at the Special Programme in Science student congress. For the latter, they won the best presentation award. Congratulations, guys!

The Special Programme in Science was established in 1996 at NUS to nurture enthusiastic students with a passion for science. The students take six tailor-made courses over the first two years of their degree, including the Integrated Science Project in the second year.