Education and Public Engagement
Science is fun, and should be fun!
————Michael Levitt, winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1,Activity:survey
Impact communities: all walks of life
Interactions: In our survey, we found that more than 77 percent of people do not understand the tuberculosis at the same time they do not know anything about the existing TB therapies. About more than three percent of the people have been suffering from tuberculosis，and most people do not have basic medical knowledge of diagnosis and treatment on tuberculosis. Thanked the Chinese policy of free treatment for tuberculosis, but many people do not know the policies, like TB treatment is free of charge. Not many people know AIDS patients are at higher risk of TB infection. At the same time, only a small number of people know how to properly protect themselves against TB.
2,Activity:speech in innospace+
Impact communities: public
Interactions: shanghai, China
Our team had been committed to carry forward the rise of general public, so we had a speech in innospace+ in Shanghai with the titled of “Why TB Kills?”.
The audience of our speech have a very strong reaction, which proves that our project is not only attract professionals, but also has a great attraction of the general public.
3,Activity:botanical tour for primary students
Impact communities: primary students
Interactions: To let more children have interest in synthetic biology, we organized a tour of the botanical garden for kids, so that they can learn more about synthetic biology and knowledge of Botany.
4,Activity:official account on WeChat
Impact communities: biology lovers and the public
Interactions: In order to help the public better understand what synthetic biology is, we have set up our own official account. Our long-term output has made our official account recognized by many people. A lot of feedbacks from readers are positive, which enhances our confidence
5,Activity:CIWEI youth workshop
Impact communities: young adults
Interactions: In cooperation with CIWEI, a local charity organization, we want to convey the idea of keeping a healthy lifestyle and TB knowledge to the participants, and there was a kindergarten teacher thought what we are doing is interesting and meaningful.
6,Activity:flipped classroom
Impact communities: children
Interactions: In order to help children better understand what is TB and fitness, and let them generate more interest of synthetic biology. We organized the exhibition and flipped classroom in HONG XING Primary School in Baoshan District, Shanghai. The teaching process was lively and interesting, and of course, can make children more likely to be able to accept and learn more about synthetic biology.
7,Activity:Workshop
Impact communities: biology lovers and college students.
Interactions: To help more synthetic biology enthusiasts learn the latest news of synthetic biology, we held regular workshops to help them establish and learn more about synthetic biology, which expand iGEM impact on the public.
8,Activity:dinner brainstorm
Impact communities: Christians
Interactions: To extend information about our project in the eyes of religious people, we had a dinner with Christians. In their eyes free to change the composition of the cell genes was confusing and obey the god’s will. Therefore, we talk with them, and after listening to our narration, we also listened to their idea of The Creation respectfully. We started to understand each other and what’s more, we obtained their affirmation of our project and accept the idea of iGEM.
9,Activity:comic book
Impact communities: children
Interactions: Mr. Levitt gave us a brief explanation on how to make science becomes more interesting and justify, According to such a concept, we designed a comic book for young people，And this allows them to understand more about synthetic biology
10,Activity:Elite union
Impact communities: college students
Interactions: We also made collaboration with Enactus China, an entrepreneurship club, and we were invited to have a speech of a STEAM case on biology filed. After listening to what we prepared, many partners think what we did is cool and wanted to involve iGEM in their STEAM class.
11,Activity:Art painting activity
Impact communities: college students
Interactions: To encourage more and more young people having interest in synthetic biology, we start an activity on creating the painting about synthetic biology on campus, which helped us collect many creative paintings.
12,Activity:Bio-X Club
Impact communities: biology lovers and college students
Interactions: In order to help biology enthusiasts to carry out mutual exchanges and communication, we have established Bio-x Club.
CPU Bio-X Club, a growing student-based school organization for life sciences of China Pharmaceutical University, was established by our senior schoolmates—2017 CPU_CHINA iGEMers in 2015. The senior members had built up the first team to join the 2017 iGEM competition, as well as set up all kinds of provisions and held routine activities from scratch. The initial and ongoing aim is to find students who are interested in synthetic biology and other disciplines related to life sciences, with an academic platform to exchange. Also, the club founder aimed to take apart in iGEM competition, as well as training new iGEMers. There has been a series of conventional activities in our Bio-X Club under the continuing efforts to achieve our goals:
(1) Journal Club (JC). Journal Club is a weekly activity for club members to present reports on publications as well as analyses of former iGEM projects, with no limitation on the audience involved, which means all are welcomed to our JC. Online JC during the long vacations is a substitution to offline activities.
(2) Instructor projects. We arranged several senior members to design specific training plans to guide those newly joined members. Basically we combine the fundamental training of academic abilities by regularly reading latest publications and summarizing through writing articles with the transformation of theoretical study methods to practical use by analyzing iGEM cases. Members are trained not only by reading publications, writing summaries and giving presentations, but also encouraged to actively participate in lab experiences, therefore developing research experiences.
(3) Annually activities. In the year 2017 and 2018, we held “academic debate contest” and “surviving in the biovalley” respectively. These activities emphasized public engagement and allowed all participants to learn about cases of synthetic biology that were translated into practical uses. This year, we invited 14 teams from other universities or high schools in Nanjing and other cities around to hold a regional meetup, and we were honored to welcome the senior iGEMer & instructor, Haoqian Zhang Ph.D and iGEM Asia ambassador Dorothy to give professional guidance on project itself and human practices, through which every team exchanged problems and advices, even set up future collaboration.
(4) TED X speech. on introductions of synthetic biology. Our former leader Huandi Xu gave an impressive speech— “Synthesis Biology—Create a better future” . By introducing iGEM to the audience, we promote public awareness of this field and this great international competition.
(5) Interviews for member recruitment. Knowing that there are still many talented students in CPU with outstanding abilities that are yet to join our club, we held this interview to set up an iGEM team for the upcoming year of competition.
(6) Online social media. We do not simply focus on offline activities, Twitter, Facebook , Sina Weibo as well as Wechat are all our online pipes to record progress and communicate with other teams worldwide.
CPU Bio-X Club is not just an ordinary academic organization for undergraduates who are interested in biology, but also a great platform for recruitments of new iGEMers, a team that acts under the guidance of practices with various social roles, a club in search of resolutions in biological systems, and our pipe to propagandize the synthetic biology to CPU, to Nanjing, to China and to the world.
13,Activity:arts in plate
Impact communities: college students
Interactions: In order to combine art and biology. We found microbiology Party branch，and we want to improve our impact and we cooperated with professors and schoolmates to draw our pattern in plates.
14,Activity:handcrafts on TB
Impact communities: foreigners
Interactions: In order to broaden the impact of our projects, we cooperate with the International Office in our school, and conducted a handcrafts class for students from the Universities in Texas, we combined traditional Chinese clay carve and Synthetic biology so that they can understand more about Synthetic biology.
15,Activity:a lecture on synthetic biology and iGEM at Nanjing Foreign Language School (NFLS)
Impact communities: companies and the public
We delivered a lecture on synthetic biology and iGEM at Nanjing Foreign Language School (NFLS). During the lecture, we introduced the concept of synthetic biology and what to do for participating in iGEM. In addition, we also showed the comic book to make them better understand the values of synthetic biology. In the lecture, the students showed great interest in synthetic biology and we were impressed with the thoughtful questions they asked, which gave us many insights to the future application of our project.
16,Activity:Sanofi
Impact communities: companies and the public
Interactions: From our survey, we found that many of our patients need to improve compliance and consult doctors. We happened to obtain the opportunity to participate in a chronic diseases contest sponsored by Sanofi. Ultimately our success on the advice of mentors We designed a APP NCDS.
17,Activity:NCDS
Impact communities: TB patients
Interactions: Cause we noticed that latest treatment on tuberculosis hasn’t been developed, and an old Chinese saying goes, “Prevention is greater than treatment.” We started to think how we can help the prevention process by reducing the contact made by the patients. It happens to be an app completion on chronic diseases in Sanofi, so we think this can be useful for the TB patients, then we consulted many entrepreneurs on pharmacy on how to design an app. Eventually, we come up with a brand new APP NCDS, a personalized chronic diseases management app, which can help the patients record their data, consult doctors, talking within the community. At last, we successfully won the 4th Grand of UKCNEA(united kingdom and China Entrepreneurs Association), AI+VC most potential prize, and many other prize from local governments, which shares impact on others a lot, and there are different companies share interests on investing us.
18,Activity:China Innovation and entrepreneurship camps
Impact communities: entrepreneurs
Interactions: China Innovation and entrepreneurship camps invited Yuqi Wang to participate in the national Personnel training camp held in Zhangjiagang, Suzhou, Jiangsu.
We had the pleasure of participating in the event and share a project, investors also expressed interest in us, and provided us with a lot of interesting opinions, such as the development of APP applications should be more biased infectious diseases in daily management.
19,Activity:Innovation & Entrepreneurship WUXI Exhibition
Impact communities: public
Interactions: In order to further expand our influence, we participated in Innovation & Entrepreneurship WUXI Exhibition, and exchanged with senior entrepreneurs in the field of financial block chain, synthetic biology, and showed our achievements to the public to expand our influence.
20,Activity:Nanjing reginal meetup
Impact communities: other iGEM teams
Interactions: In public participation, we also held the 3rd Nanjing meetup, in order to help more regional partnerships and further their pre-project to perfect. At the same time, iGEM Asian Ambassador in Dorothy and Dr. Zhang Haoqian gave our projects some comments, let us have a more complete reflection.
21,Activity:meeting on the transformation in pharmacy education
Impact communities: Africa government
Interactions: In order to further improve our project, we seized the opportunity to talk to the formal Director of the Education Department of Ethiopia, Mr. Steven. He gave very positive feedback of our project, and encouraged us about our creativity and innovation.
22,Activity："Belt and road, mutual benefit and win-win "International Academic Forum on Pharmaceutical Policy forum
Impact communities: companies
Interactions: In the area all the way to the forum, we talked with many companies, And to show them the idea of our project, they made some comments on our projects, and combined their company's products gives some advice
