Ethics and Philosophy Essay Contest
The International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Ethics and Philosophy Committee announced in 2024 a global call for submissions to the Environmental Ethics Essay Contest, open to graduate students and early-career researchers (within five years of receiving their terminal degree).
The contest is administered by the ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee. To ensure procedural fairness, all essays undergo blind review and are evaluated according to a rubric developed by members of the Essay Committee.
The International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Ethics and Philosophy Committee announces a call for an environmental ethics essay contest for graduate students and early career researchers (< 5 years of terminal degree) throughout the world. The ISEE ethics and philosophy “committee aims to strengthen and promote ethics and philosophy in environmental epidemiology.”
For your essay, draw example(s) from your academic training or your own personal research and/or life experiences to address the importance of the ethical deliberation in addressing one of the following:
A. Describe an environmental health problem where it would be important for an epidemiologist to consider the ethical implications when studying as an epidemiologist.
B. Explain who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions.
C. Describe how to weigh the ethical implications of environmental impact on population migration and disruption.
We strongly encourage you to read the ISEE Ethics Guidelines for Environmental Epidemiologists (2023) as a point of reference. The ISEE Ethics Guidelines for Environmental Epidemiologists (2023) is available here.
Essay Requirements:
- Written in English
- No more than 1,000 words, excluding references; minimum font size = 11 (Times New Roman or Arial), with margins no narrower than 1-inch all sides
- Submitted as a word document
- Uphold the values of academic integrity (no plagiarism or copying)
- Essays should be original work and not previously published
- All citation styles are welcome but must contain correct consistent citations throughout the document
- Submitted online by June 11, 2026, 11:59pm CDT, USA
Essay Review Process:
The essay contest is organized by the ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee. For procedural fairness, the essays will be blinded to the judges who will review the essays based on a rubric, developed by members of the 2026 Essay Committee.
Rubric. Essays will be reviewed for content quality (including scientific accuracy of information), originality and creativity, writing style and clarity, and appropriate and accurate referencing (minimum of three references required).
**Note that essays will be checked for plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined as professing ideas, innovative compositions, scholarly works, etc. as your own that were prepared by someone else. Examples of plagiarism include, but are not limited to, utilizing available scholarly papers or essays that have been written by someone else (ex. Ghostwriter, large language models such as ChatGPT or Grammarly), copying another person’s ideas, and/or failure to cite references used for your work, or using incorrect citations. If we detect that an essay has been written by AI or contains plagiarism (excluding references), the committee will not review it.
Competition Awards:
- The top three essays will receive a one year membership to the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
- The top three winners will have the opportunity to consent to showcase their work on the ISEE website
2025 Essay Winners
Shreeraksha Naik
Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions? (Click on the title above to read the full essay)
Dr. Shreeraksha Naik, is a post-graduate resident at the Centre for Community Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, located in New Delhi, India. Her winning essay was in response to the question “Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions?” Dr. Naik begins her essay highlighting a conversation with a colleague in which she recalls how the past summers have changed and that it rains all the time. She then continues to define responsibility and proposes that human’s mentality needs to change to accept our own actions and then take actions and responsibility to make a difference. Dr. Naik’s essay concludes with some true stories of a five-year old child and an adult who took responsibility and took actions to address improvement of our “wounded planet.”
Elisia White
Mother Earth – It takes a Village(Click on the title above to read the full essay)
Ms. Elisia White, whose home country is Jamaica, is studying Environmental Health Sciences at New York University in the USA. Her winning essay was also in response to the question “Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions?” Ms. White begins her essay describing how a staircase represents transition from one level to another. Her essay continues to use this staircase metaphor to address the steps of responsibility for promoting climate actions. The first step begins at the individual level, with the second step climbing to the community, followed by the third step up to organizations such as schools, non-profit agencies, and companies. Once that step is reached, Ms. White, continues the metaphor writing that the top step represents government. Each of these steps of the staircase represent how actions advance. Ms. White concludes her essay with a statement about caring about Mother Earth daily, as much as she has cared about us.
We thank both Dr. Naik and Ms. White for participating in the 2025 ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee Essay Contest and congratulate them for writing outstanding essays.