Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Outreach
Education and Engagement
Radio interview
On the 2nd of July the team were interviewed by the local radio station Sveriges Radio P4 Göteborg. We discussed the iGEM concept itself and how iGEM can be a good complement to our education in biotechnology. We described our project idea and design but also how the local environment became an inspiration to our project. The focus of the interview was to make people aware of the problem with PCB in our marine environment and how it affects different living organisms. Synthetic biology and GMO in general can often be connected to something negative and for this reason our interview was focused around describing why synthetic biology and GMO can be used to solve an environmental problem such as increased PCB concentration in our waters. We also discussed the future aspects of our project and how a possible product could look like, but also mentioned how important human practices is for our project, how different companies and organisations are important for the development of our project and the improvement of our knowledge about the problem. We discussed the problem with PCB and how it affects our environment. The goal with the interview was to be able to easily describe our project for the people living in Sweden who do not have in-depth knowledge abount synthetic biology and GMO. People have contacted our team members after the interview and thanked us for giving this environmental problem a thought, and also complimented us for being able to describe how we work in the lab and how we can use synthetic biology to solve different problems in a way that was easily understood.
AstraZeneca's Summer School for Young Scientists
Unga forskare (Young scientists) is an organization that hosts a summer school about science every year for students in the ages 14 to 16 years old in both Stockholm and Gothenburg. We got the opportunity to have a lecture and seminar session with the students during the summer school in Gothenburg. We introduced the students to the basic concepts of synthetic biology and how it can be used to solve different problems in our community. The seminar session was divided into three parts with, each with a different focus. First, the students discussed what synthetic biology can be used for and what they thought could be the problem with the synthetic biology solution. In the second part we discussed different questions and problems in biotechnology from an ethical perspective. The questions dealt with the problem with introducing a new organism into ecosystems, introducing new phenotypes into an organism, why GMO is feared in our community, vaccination and a brief discussion on the moral status of different organisms. In the final part of the seminar session the students designed their own iGEM project. They came up with a problem in our community and discussed a possible solution to this problem using synthetic biology.
After the seminar session we had another lecture for the students in which we presented our project and how the want to modify yeast to degrade PCB. We also asked the students about what they thought could be different challenges for our project and if they thought this was a necessary environmental problem to solve. The goal with this lecture and seminar was to introduce the concept of synthetic biology in a more interactive way compared to what they are used to. Introduce the students to iGEM, how they can be part of iGEM in the future and how they can use biotechnology to solve different problems in our community.
Lunch lecture for students at Chalmers University of Technology
The team hosted a lunch lecture with the Society for Biological Engineering Student Chapter Chalmers for the students at Chalmers University of Technology. Over 100 students attended the lecture, during which we presented our project and what we have done during our iGEM year in an attempt to increase the awareness and interest of iGEM at our university. We explained the iGEM competition and how it could be used as insight to the research field and how it looks like to work in a lab but also how it can be adapted to do many other different things such as speak on national radio, create your own website, talk to different companies or use your artistic skill and create different figures and animations. The students in attendance were both master and bachelor students and could be a part of iGEM as soon as next year. We presented how our project could be a solution to the PCB problem in our waters but also presented how our brainstorming sessions looked like and what inspired us wen coming up with the project. Hopefully this event inspired some student to join iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg next year.
Social media
Social media is a platform where you can easily reach many different people around the world, especially different iGEM teams. During 2019 our team wanted to expand our outreach, with a specific focus on instagram. We had the goal to increase our followers to get a more established platform from which we could expand the interest of synthetic biology and in that way increase the interest of iGEM among the students of Chalmers University of Technology, as well as on a larger scale.
