St. Louis high school student Jack Lynch’s winning entry in the National Eye Institute’s teen video competition started with a final project in his physics class.
One of the options for the assignment from his teacher at the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur was to submit a STEM-related video to a national contest, and he knew this was the perfect way to combine his passions for video production and fishing.
Lynch, 17, started learning how to edit videos when he was 12 years old, and it became his passion. He said he begged his parents to get him a computer for his birthday so he could download Adobe After Effects, and now he spends hours a day producing videos. His love for fishing started long before that, with trips to Cape Girardeau every summer to fish with his grandpa.
His video “Eyes on the water: How bass and bluegill vision can lead to sustainable fishing” won first place in the Science in Your World category in the NEI’s Eye on the Future teen video contest. The competition received over 120 submissions from students in grades 9-12, and Lynch and the other category winners each received a $2,000 cash prize.
“I thought I was going to get some extra points for the final project for entering,” Lynch said. “I really didn’t expect to win at all.”
In past years, winners of the contest were invited to the National Institutes of Health campus for an in-person recognition event, but that will not happen this year due to uncertainty regarding federal funding. The NEI is a branch of the NIH that supports vision research.
Although Lynch doesn’t want to enter a science field, he sees video editing as a science of its own.
“In a program like After Effects, you open the application and it looks like a plane cockpit,” Lynch said. “It takes a while to learn the science and the details behind, you know, how do I use this?”
This year’s Eye on the Future was the fourth annual competition. Dr. Michael Chiang, director of the NEI, said the group’s goal with the contest is to get more young people interested in science and research.
“At the end of the day, what I really want to do is to make people see how interesting and fun science can be and how important it is for people’s everyday lives,” Chiang said.
He said Lynch’s video was a great application of the category of “Science in your World,” because he made his video about something important to him.
Lynch said his grandfather was proud of the accomplishment, especially because it was fishing and science-related.
“He used to be a teacher, and he taught biology, so I know this was something that was close to his heart,” Lynch said.
Lynch will be a senior at the Whitfield School this fall. He said he is hoping to get an internship with a company in the film industry, and he is also looking at colleges with video production programs.
His contest win also came with an "A" on his physics project, which he was equally excited about.
