Team:NTHU Taiwan/Public Engagement
TRANS biomedical conference
TRANS (Transforming Healthcare, Transcending Limit, Strong) biomedical conference is the largest innovative biomedical entrepreneurship conference in Asia. Every year, it is served as a platform for entrepreneurs, experts, investors, and students to exchange ideas. It is a conference that gently embraces innovative ideas while providing honest insights into the world at the same time.
We believed that it is important to look into the market aspect. We got in touch with startups, investors, and citizens interested in our project. It is a great experience for us to learn to explain our project to others and how businesses might value our product. At first, when we explained our concept, we emphasized too much on the details of the promoter and DNA design. However, that is not the whole of our project. We learned how to introduce each part of our project clearly to the public and to people without a deep understanding on biology. Most importantly, we realized a simple yet important principle for startups: "If you want to influence the world, your product has to survive in competition." The investors gave us lots of advice on how to get funding and suggested us to make more efforts to understand our potential users. Fortunately, one of the people we talked to was familiar with fertilizer and happens to know someone who worked in the agriculture policy department in the government. This lead to our talk with the farmer association. Read more details in Human Practices/Policy.
Public Speech with NCTU Formosa
We believe that the value of synthetic biology should be spread to the public. To raise the concern for synthetic biology, together with NCTU Formosa, we held a small conference and introduced our project to students, professors, and the locals in Hsinchu. After the talks, the audiences had a better understanding on the usage and limitations of synthetic biology. Some audience had comments on our project which inspired us to make some changes on how we displayed our project.
iGEM Taiwan Meetup
Engaging with other teams in the iGEM community is a vital component of the iGEM competition. NCHU_iGEM held a meetup for iGEM teams in Taiwan. It is a great opportunity for us to engage with other iGEMers. We gained a lot from iGEMers who studies agriculture and biochemistry. They mentioned under some kind of situations our device might not work. For instance, heavy rain may wash out all the nutrition. Hence, we had to research more on the effect of weather conditions on the fertilizer. We then improved our design of the device. Read more details in Human Practices/Experts.
Conference of China iGEMer Community
CCiC, Conference of China iGEMer Community, is held in Shenzhen, China. This year, gratefully, we were invited to participate in this grand event as oversea teams. We believe that it is a great chance to expand our horizons and meet with foreign iGEMers. During CCiC, we were amazed by the ingenuity and thinking of iGEMers. They inspired us in lots of ways. Furthermore, we constructed a collaboration with the USTC team. By the way, we were really grateful to be voted as the "Best Poster".
Lectures for the freshman in Biology Department, NTHU
We recognize the value of sharing. Along the project, we received lots of help from the iGEM community. We would like more people to acknowledge the greatness of iGEM. Therefore, we held a lecture for the freshman entering the Biology Department in our University. In the lecture, we introduced them the history of iGEM and some interesting past projects.
In order to give the freshman a better picture of synthetic biology, we played the "upstream downstream game" with them. This is a self-designed game. Basically, two kinds of cards, the Upstream cards, and the Downstream cards, are given to groups of students. Upstream cards are the promoters, such as thermal sensitive system or light-sensitive system. Downstream cards are the output, such as changing color or producing oxygen. Every group will draw two cards from the Upstream cards and two cards from the Downstream cards. Then, they have to think of creative applications for the combination they received. The freshman liked the game so much and came up with many amazing ideas. We were amazed by the creativity they display.
Internship program for the sophomore in NTHU
Other than promoting iGEM to people who had little acknowledgment about it, it seems to us that it is important to build a platform for students who are interested in iGEM, yet haven’t participated in the community, can inherit our experience. Therefore, we provide an Internship Program for the sophomores. We guided them through the process of our experiments and they look at the process of building a project. One of the interns replied to us that she realized it is challenging when wet lab and dry lab are communicating. It takes time and good communication skills for the two labs to understand each others' progress. Overall, the internship program provides the interns a chance to have a closer look at how projects are built and the interesting yet challenging tasks that they might experience in the future.
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