This year, HiGEM attended New England GEM (NEGEM), which was graciously hosted by MIT on their campus. The iGEM programs of Laval University, Stony Brook University, the University of Connecticut, and Stanford-Brown-RISD were all also in attendance. The agenda included a keynote address, opportunities for each team to present to and receive feedback from the other teams attending and a panel of four guest judges, and even an (immensely appreciated) ice cream social in the middle to keep us well-fed through it all!


For us, this was our first-ever opportunity to publicly share our project and preliminary results. The act of putting together our presentation was a good psychological checkpoint and reminded us both of how much we’d already accomplished, as well as how much more work we had left in front of us. It was also encouraging to hear that, even though our project had been thus far plagued by cloning troubles, everyone else was scrambling up the same syn-bio learning curve.

We found that answering judges’ and other teams’ questions was one of the best ways to formalize our understanding of our own research and goals. The toughest questions we faced definitely came from MIT’s mentor (also serving as a judge), Dr. Deepak Mishra, who demanded a more rigorous explanation of shear mechanosensing and our team’s human practices plans than we were originally expecting. Tough as it may have been for the three of us to field questions on our feet, we are nonetheless grateful for the experience.


Other teams and judges critiqued everything from our experimental design to our presentation formatting, and we tried over the following weeks to incorporate our feedback. For, reference, here are sample slides from update presentations given to our mentor before and after receiving our NEGEM feedback.

Additionally, we came into some correspondence with Dr. Deepak Mishra after NEGEM, who had prior experience working with the TANGO assay and offered to help us troubleshoot some of our cloning difficulties. He taught us the method of using Golden Gate Assembly, and explained to us the pros and cons associated with this method and with the method of Gibson Assembly, which helped us in our troubleshooting process. For this help, as well as all of the other feedback, support, and connections we gained at NEGEM, we are immensely grateful to MIT’s team and everyone else in attendance that day.