Team:MADRID UCM/Public Engagement

Educational & Public Engagement – iGem Madrid

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Educational & Public Engagement

Social involvement has been a vital part of our philosophy since the very beginning

Science gets stale locked in a lab. We believe that the future is out there, so we expanded our project beyond its own limits and we established a conversation with general society in various ways. In order for our project to be truly worthwhile, it must influence others, it must inspire and create more than just the products and data it produces. It must engage with the world.

1 Educational

Madrid iGEM - Hub

Last year’s competition involved an amazing transdisciplinary training for Madrid college students, providing a priceless experience that marked a before and after in our young careers.

So... why stop there if we can go further? Why not try to give back our learning and get more people involved in this journey? With this idea in mind, we decided to take the next step and make the iGEM experience a multigenerational experiment. By this, not only people from different academic backgrounds can work alongside each other, but also people from different ages, lending a hand to the next generation of future scientists.

During our preparation for iGEM 2019, we have had the privilege to share our workspace with a new high-school team. This has been a great opportunity to learn from each other and gain new insights and valuable additions for the lab’s daily routine. As Aristotle said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, which has proven to be right every single day.

Results speak for themselves. For our part, we have taken care of the high-school students, guiding them and showing them how a problem (cholera detection) should be addressed through different disciplines to find an effective and holistic solution. They have seen how our successes were critically dependent on team communication and that the more diverse our background, the more solutions came to our minds when addressing a problem. This dynamic has helped them to view their future careers with a wider and more realistic perspective. They learned quickly how to work in a college environment, and they were incredibly keen on learning everything they could, from brainstorming sessions to wet-lab work, web designing, writing results and more. Being able to share with them our knowledge was truly rewarding. It made us feel like we were part of a big family in the best possible way.
For their part, the high-school team contributed a fresh, creative and enthusiastic perspective on working on the lab. They were the perfect reminder of what brought us all there, which is something that should never be forgotten. More than once they surprised us with their progress, pointing out the fact that students of their age, even though they have fewer years of experience, should never be underestimated. They taught us that some of the best ideas rise from the lack of fear from failing and that, sometimes, the best solutions are the simplest ones. In brief, this dynamic of constant exchange has been one of the most important experiences of this year’s competition.

SynBio workshops in Cameroon

We care about people. We have repeatedly emphasized the importance we attach to knowing what is really needed and wanted by the people we work with. We believe in scientific research connected with local communities, so we consider it essential to talk face-to-face with the people who will make direct use of our technology - our most important stakeholders. Through this engagement, the people on the ground in Cameroon gave us a new, non-official perspective on the cholera situation there.
Addressing local expertise to shape our technology means a win-win relationship with the communities we work in. Our efforts are aimed at avoiding an imposed top-down procedure, which has been the cause of failure of many development initiatives and has proved to be problematic and victimizing - at best. To carry out our research, we have considered local understandings of cholera, and all the implications this has. More about this can be found in our Human Practices webpage.
The idea manifested itself in the workshops we carried out during our Open Residence in the MboaLab, a bio-hackerspace located on the outskirts of Yaoundé. The whole event lasted two weeks, which due to logistical and material requirements we divided into two parts: a first week of familiarization with the place, and a second in which we ran a series of workshops. Those attending our workshops were educated people - local scientists and lab workers - who proved valuable in gaining feedback on our main project.
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Integrated Human Practices

Click here to read the full description of the workshops and our collaboration in Cameroon!
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2 Public Engagement

Media

Regarding our media presence, the AEGIS Project has appeared in over 20 different pieces, both in science-oriented publications and general-interest newspapers. The coverage given to our work has let people all over Spain know not only about us, but also about the iGEM competition, thus opening up the possibility for more students in the future to team up and participate too.

Most of the communications have focused on the social dimension of our project, some of them covering our fieldwork trip to Cameroon. Through this readers have been able to connect with us and understand the ultimate purpose of our project beyond the competition, which was also a huge help boosting the crowdfunding.

Clearly, the media’s capacity to move such a large number of people has gone beyond our expectations. For our part, we also wanted to actively contribute to the project’s spread by opening our own Twitter and Instagram accounts. We make use of them by posting our various everyday activities, as well as some special events, and openly acknowledging and giving credit to our sponsors. Social networks were also a useful tool for getting involved with other iGEM teams and establish a communication flow.

The social network users went, again, beyond our original expectations. They not only helped us reach out for more sponsors and touch a wider coverage, but they also made us feel part of the iGEM community by seeing other teams’ work, team members’ presentations and the best and worst moments of their day-to-day life.

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An informative dossier and a landing page are available as complementary public communication materials. Both reflected our image when introducing ourselves to the press, to new people or possible sponsors

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Landing page

Click here to visit our landing page!
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Dossier

Click here to read the full dossier!
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Crowdfunding

Our human practices have been central to our project. We have based our work on the tangible effect it has on real human lives, and we hope that this will go further than the competition itself. It is truly a dream that our work throughout this year could save people’s lives in the future. We believe it is essential to not limit science to Western hegemonic knowledge, only accessible and actually useful for a small percentage of the world’s population. We want to go beyond the borders and leave our mark by making something good.

Our dreams are not small, and, despite the financial help that our home universities and sponsors provided, the project demanded a bigger investment. So we had to make our way through the obstacles and find a complementary funding source. Looking around us, we realized that we had a huge support coming from the general society, and many people who got to know what we were working on wanted to collaborate. The idea of setting up a crowdfunding page came crystal clear. By contributing to our campaign, people made the project reciprocal and allowed us to keep working towards a solution to a problem that involves a significant part of the global population. In the end, we are proud to say that we managed to collect almost 5000 €.

Needless to say, the whole team is beyond grateful for this. Moreover, we are aware of the fact that this goes way further than just us; we have had the opportunity of taking a glimpse at the society walking hand in hand with science, moving towards a better world.

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Crowdfunding

Take a look to the crowdfunding campaign we launched this past summer with Goteo!
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A video is worth a thousand words, check it out!