Team:TAS Taipei/Collaborations

TAS_Taipei

Collaborations

Collaborations with Other iGEM Teams

We collaborated with a tremendous amount of teams this year. We loved helping other teams with their projects and receiving help with ours. More importantly, it was fun to learn about other teams' projects and to share the experience that is iGEM!

AFRL Carroll and their Wiki Guide

We collaborated with the US_AFRL_CarrollHS team on their wiki guide. Through a video call, we suggested that they should include information on how to use templates on the iGEM wiki server since they can be confusing for new iGEMers. Go check out their super helpful wiki guide here!

Figure 1. Video Call with the AFRL Carroll team

(Organized by Kimberly H., Jessica C., Vivian W., Jessie H.)

UNSW Business Plan

UNSW shared an extremely useful marketing plan template with us. We referred to the template when we were drafting our own marketing plan. For more information, check out UNSW’s wiki.

(Used by Eugene C., Jessica C., Kimberly H.)

Stony Brook Instagram Challenge

We participated in Stony Brook's iGEM Instagram challenge. The goal of this challenge was to increase the iGEM teams' internet footprint. For a week, we posted images and videos that corresponded to the theme of that day. Please refer to Stony Brook’s wiki for more information on this challenge.

(Participated by Yasmin L., Allison K., Jessie H., Jessica C., Jill L., Kimberly H., Vivian W.)

United Nations SDG Collaborations

UN Sustainable Development Goals & the iGEMxSDGs Challenge

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 goals that the United Nations aims to achieve by 2030. From reaching No Poverty (Goal 1) to addressing Climate Change (Goal 13), the goals cover all the pressing issues in our world today. We collaborated with teams Costa Rica, and Tuebingen to create the iGEMxSDGs Challenge with the hope of spreading awareness of the SDGs among the iGEM community.

In preparation for the challenge, team Costa Rica created a template on their wiki that allowed iGEM teams participating in the challenge to select the icons of the goals their project pertained to. These icons were then compiled into a collage that could then be uploaded onto Instagram or Twitter. We began the challenge by posting our own teams’ collages and tagging four other iGEM teams. The tagged teams would then use our template to make their own collage and tag four other teams. So far, over 60 teams have participated! You can view participants’ images through Instagram and Twitter with the hashtags #igemxsdgs and #igemxsdgschallenge as well as our Instagram page @igemxsdgs.

Team Costa Rica created a bar graph with the data from our challenge. As shown in the figure, through collaboration with these teams, we show how iGEM can make a difference by contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals!

It is not surprising that a substantial 53.3 percent of the teams that participated in the challenge chose Goal 17 Partnership For the Goals as iGEM is heavily correlated with cooperation and interaction between different teams. Even this challenge itself tackles Goal 17 in terms of the collective effort to spread awareness of SDGs. Additionally, over 70 percent of teams selected “Good Health and Well Being” and over 50 percent selected “Responsible Consumption and Production”. This highlights how the spirit of iGEM aligns with the worldwide goals set out by the United Nations.

We reached out to several iGEM 2019 teams to participate in the challenge, and successfully received submissions from the following participants: ASIJ_IGEM, ASIJ_Tokyo, Aachen, Aalto-Helsinki, Bioriidl_Somaiya, CCU iGEM, iGEM Calgary, Costa Rica, DTU-Denmark, FAU_Erlangen, Grenoble-Alpes, ICT-Mumbai, IGEM IISER Tirupati, IISER-Kolkata, IISER-Pune-India, IISc-Bangalore, Lund, MSP-MAASTRICHT, Manchester, Moscow, Northern BC iGEM, Northwestern, Nottingham iGEM, OhioState, Purdue iGEM, SNU_India, Sao_Carlos-Brazil, Stony Brook, Sydney_Australia, TAU_Israel, TU_Dresden, TU_Eindhoven, Tacoma_RAINmakers, Tartu TUIT, Team Hamburg, Team SDU-Denmark, Team Tuebingen, Thessaloniki, Thessaly, UAlberta, UC iGEM Team, UNSW_Australia, USP_SaoCarlos-Brazil, US_AFRL_CarrollHS, UiOslo iGEM, Wageningen_UR, iGEM Athens 2019, iGEM Chalmers- Gothenburg, iGEM Duesseldorf, iGEM Evry Paris-Saclay, iGEM IIT-Madras, iGEM Kaiserslautern, iGEM Marburg 2019, iGEM Memes, iGEM NCKU Tainan, iGEM NU Kazakhstan 2019, iGEM Strasbourg, iGEM Toronto, Igem_nawi_graz, iGEM-UANL, iGEM Copenhagen, iGEM Poitiers, iGEM at William and Mary, iGEM Elan Biotronics, iGEM exeter, iGEM Team USP BR, iGEM Lab Pats, iGEM TU Delft, iGEM Madrid, nchu igem, CU iGEM, Lambert, iGEM_Tudy.

Figure 2. Video Call with team Costa Rica and
team Tuebingen.

(Organized by Vivian W., Eugene C., Jessica C., Kimberly H.)

World-wide Sustainable Development Goals Video Conference

On September 14th, 21:00 pm (GMT +8), we launched our iGEM x Sustainable Development Goals Video Conference. A total of 7 high school and college iGEM teams (iGEM UM_Macau, Tuebingen, Costa Rica, MSP-Maastricht, Tartu Tuit, Greatbay_SZ, Toronto) attended our conference to discuss the correlation of their project’s goal with the SDGs. Prior to the conference, we asked teams to create a video to briefly introduce their iGEM project and bridge it with specific SDGs. During the conference, each team first recapped their video. Then, teams had time to discuss and answer each others’ questions; most of the questions pertained to roadblocks each team faced, applications of their projects to society, successful aspects of their projects, and changes in perspective due to the conference. Through this discussion, we improved our understanding of each others' projects and raised awareness about the SDGs within the iGEM community.

Figure 3. Participants of our video conference shown on the left.

(Conference organized by Eugene C., Kimberly H., Jessica C.)

TASMUN Conference + MUN Impact

iGEM provides such a great way to potentially make a real difference in the world. In this section, we outline a number of ways in which we increased the reach of iGEM through Model United Nations and a world-wide collaboration effort to tackle to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In April 2019, TAS hosted its annual Taipei American School Model United Nations (TASMUN) conference. Over 700 participants attended from countries all over Asia. Unlike conventional Model United Nations (MUN) conferences, the theme of this conference was MUN Impact and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs (17 in total) are a set of goals created by the United Nations that they hope to achieve by 2030. MUN Impact encourages high school students to use the SDGs as a framework to create projects and tackle global issues.

Figure 4. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nation, 2019)

From the TASMUN conference, we realized MUN’s vast platform - consisting of middle school, high school, and college students around the world - could be used to spread awareness about iGEM and synthetic biology (Ryan, 2007). On the other hand, we also discovered that iGEM could assist MUN in transforming their ideas and resolutions into actions. We participated in a MUN Impact competition within the conference, which allowed MUN participants to submit videos about the projects they were working on and how they correlated with the SDGs.Therefore, our team presented our project, Adieu, Residues, at TASMUN to help inspire those participating in MUN to join iGEM in order to actually make an impact on the problems they learn and discuss.

Therefore, our team presented our project, Adieu, Residues, at TASMUN to help inspire those participating in MUN to join iGEM in order to actually make an impact on the problems they learn and discuss. In our presentations, we talked about how our iGEM project addressed three of the SDGs:

In addition to the presentation, we also put together a video to briefly describe our project and the SDGs we addressed. The delegates of the conference voted on all participating projects, and we were honored to receive the General Assembly Award of the 2019 TASMUN MUN Impact Competition and a monetary prize, which we donated to Tse Xin, an organization that supports sustainable agriculture.

Watch our video below, and click to learn more about MUN Impact and the SDGs! Click hereto view an article about our participation in TASMUN on the MUN Impact website!

(Presented by Iris H; Video featuring Daniel C, Eugene C, Jessie H, and edited by Alexander C)

MUN Qatar Leadership Conference

The Qatar Leadership Conference (QLC) is one of the largest annual professional development conferences designed to develop leadership within schools involved in Model United Nations, service, activism, and media studies through hundreds of workshops. This year, our team had the opportunity to lead one of these workshops: “Achieving the SDGs through Extra Curriculars”. In this workshop, we emphasized the importance of using the SDGs as an overarching goal to work towards in everyday activities and projects. Specifically, we highlighted the importance of iGEM in allowing high schoolers to make a profound impact on the SDGs.

Figure 5. TAS_Taipei presenting about our collaborations
with the United Nations Sustainable Development
Goals at Qatar and introducing the biobrick parts
to other Qatar participants.

Figure 6. TAS_Taipei discussing our
iGEM project with other Qatar participants.

(Presented/Organized by Dhirpal S.)

References

Ryan. (2007). Best Delegate. Retrieved from https://bestdelegate.com/how-big-is-model-united-nations/.

United Nations. (2019). Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300.