BioQXs Next-Gen Researchers: 11 High Merit Students Are Writing Their Own Research
"I couldn't live with being a passenger just sitting there."
Sare wrote that line in the homework assigned after the very first session: a short blog post on why she wants to do research.
We launched the BioQXs Next-Gen Researchers Program on July 11th, and last week the cohort completed its third session, marking the halfway point of a six-week journey. This Saturday brings session four, and over the two weeks after it, each student will turn their own research question into a first abstract and introduction.
From BioEntrepreneurship - BioQXs Ideathon to Next-Gen Researchers
Next-Gen Researchers is BioQXs Academy 's **second ** program. The first was BioEntrepreneurship - BioQXs Ideathon , held with 50 students at Darüşşafaka Eğitim Kurumları on April 18th. That day's energy pushed us a step further: from working on an idea and pitching in a single day of entrepreneurship workshop to building a research question patiently over weeks. We received applications from both high school and undergraduate students, and deliberately chose to open the first cohort to high schoolers only: 11 students from Istanbul, Kocaeli, and Ankara, each with a track record in science projects or olympiads.
Three Weeks, Three Skills
The first three sessions built three skills:
A researcher's mindset: turning curiosity and critical thinking into a habit, and healthy skepticism into a reflex.
From question to study: turning a curiosity into a hypothesis, and choosing the right research type and method.
Literature skills: telling credible sources apart, using academic databases, managing citations, and using AI responsibly.
In Their Own Words
After the first session, we asked each student one question: why do you want to do research ?
Beril described what it felt like to work through a scientific paper for the first time:
"For the first time, I wasn't just learning what a textbook told me. I was watching real people figure out how to approach a question nobody had answered yet."
Belinay wrote:
"I believe the future will be shaped not by those who repeat memorized facts, but by those who dare to ask questions no one has asked yet."
Gülmine calls it " a learning process where I actually grow and genuinely enjoy myself," not just a school assignment. Ramazan says competitions and projects taught him " not to give up " when things got hard.
Why This, Why Now
High school education, in Türkiye and elsewhere, still runs largely on memorization and exam performance, and that gap matters more now than it did a decade ago. Scientific and technological progress no longer moves in slow, textbook-sized increments:
Genomic medicine
AI-assisted diagnostics
Synthetic biology
are each rewriting parts of their fields within a few years, sometimes months. An education built around memorizing a fixed body of facts and reproducing them under exam conditions cannot keep pace with a world where the facts themselves are moving targets.
What holds up is the capacity to ask a good question, judge whether a source or a claim can be trusted, and work productively inside uncertainty. Exactly the skills this program is built around. ** That is the bet behind Next-Gen Researchers: not a supplement to conventional schooling, but a genuinely different model for how the next generation of scientists gets trained. **
Closing that gap is why BioQXs Academy exists.
What's Next
This Saturday, in session four, a scientist from BioQXs' expert research team will walk the cohort through " Research Proposal and Manuscript Writing ." From there, students have two weeks to search the literature, build a hypothesis, and write their own abstract and introduction.
The deliverable isn't a certificate. It's a real first draft of research, with each student's name on it.
If you'd like to follow Next-Gen Researchers, learn more about BioQXs Academy's other programs, or apply for the next cohort, reach out to us.
Explore more insights on our * BioQXs Insights * page or contact us to discuss how we can help navigate your next innovation challenge.