How 16-Year-Old Olamikun Ogunleye Built The Teen Med Magazine, a Youth-Led Health Publication

My name is Olamikun Jason Ogunleye, and I founded Teen Med Magazine, a youth-led publication making health and medical literature accessible to teenagers around the world, when I was 16.

In April 2025, I was in the middle of my IGCSE and AS Level exam preparation at Meadowhall, which in hindsight was exactly the wrong time to start anything new. But I wanted to publish online a medical article I had written. I typed some version of “medical magazine for teenagers” into the search bar, expecting a dozen results. I wanted something for teenagers, not another university journal or a website only looking for PhD research papers. I found nothing, except one youth medical journal that had clearly been abandoned many years ago.

I remember sitting with my laptop, not feeling satisfied. How does this not exist? There should be a medical magazine simply for teenagers. Then it hit me: maybe I was just supposed to build it myself.

The idea became fully formed in May 2025, and I started building towards the end of the month. I would revise economics by day and sketch out an entire publication by night, which is not a combination I’d recommend to anyone. I reached out to Michelle Ossai, a friend from another school in Lagos, and asked if she wanted to build this with me. She said yes, and she’s been Co-founder and Managing Editor ever since. I remain the Editor-in-Chief. The two of us spent long calls just thinking out loud about what the site would be called, what it should look like, and how writers would apply. We also knew a domain wouldn’t be free, so I pitched to my mom, asking if she could pay for it. She agreed.

We launched in June 2025. Our first published article came from Sindara Opaleye, a girl in my class who was already deep into literature and writing, and who I asked to help us…