Being a Regional Winner for my Singapore Dung Beetle Checklist and Presenting it in Dublin, Ireland

Hello! I'm Zann, now a final year undergraduate in ASE. In my third year, I worked on creating a species checklist and morphological key of dung beetles in Singapore in the TEE Lab.

Earlier this year, I submitted my project, titled The Species Checklist of Dung Beetles in Singapore, to the Global Undergraduate Awards 2022. I am absolutely ecstatic that was my work was recognised by the international panel of expert judges and was awarded Regional Winner (Asia) for the Earth and Environmental Sciences category for 2022.

I've recently attended the Global Undergraduates Award Summit 2022 (GUA22), held in Dublin, Ireland, from 6th to 9th November 2022. GUA22 was an interdisciplinary undergraduate conference, featuring presentations from the global winners across 25 disciplines, with topics across the sciences and humanities. I listened to talks about World War history, Irish law of unpaid at-home caretakers, and the future of batteries and engineering. Certainly a unique experience!

Me with my poster at the UA Global Summit!

But of course, the #1 highlight for me was the opportunity to present my work as a poster! This project and conference have allowed me to be very creative with ways of presenting the results on my poster - but I settled on having the dung beetles be as large as possible and be the main point of focus to attract the attention of passer-bys. When I got it printed, there was even a brief moment of shock when the printing shop staff opened my file and got a giant dung beetle in their face. It definitely worked too, as my poster attracted people of all disciplines, who were wondering what that poster with the insects is about.

Communicating my work to such a multidisciplinary audience was a new experience for me, and the questions I received required me to search the edges of my memory for what I've read in literature, with questions about dung beetle mating, uses in agriculture, and my personal favourite question - "what is a dung beetle?", a fundamental question that honestly didn't really cross my mind prior to the event.

I presented my poster to other undergraduate students and even some judges! They were from varied fields such as sports science, communications, economics, and more.

Of course, I also has the opportunity to talk to other undergraduates about their research. Here I am with a new friend of mine from the engineering category, standing next to each of our posters!

This project would have never been possible without the support and supervision of Prof Eleanor Slade, my mentors Ong Xin Rui and Marx Yim, and my fieldwork buddy and friend, Leong Yong Xu. I also thank the NTU Undergraduate Research on Campus (URECA) for providing financial support for this project, and to both NTU URECA and the CN Yang Scholars Programme for funding my trip to attend the conference.

This exposure to different fields has certainly been an eye-opening experience, and I'm happy that I've had this opportunity to share my love for dung beetles with others too! I hope that I have managed to bring up new perspectives and change the minds of the people I spoke to, some of whom questioned the purpose of insects and viewed them merely as creepy crawlies. Hopefully, these dung beetles, and insects as a whole, now have a special place in their hearts and/or minds too!

If you would like to know more about this project, watch me present it here in during my time at this year's International Conference of Undergraduate Research.

You can also read more about my project here:

The Journey of Creating the Singapore Dung Beetles Species Checklist Part 1 The Journey of Creating the Singapore Dung Beetles Species Checklist Part 2