• Dr. Peter Facchini- a University of Calgary Professor and Co-founder of Willow Biosciences talked about his experience of taking his research and turning it into a company. He emphasized the importance of passion, patience, and persistence when starting a company.
• Emily Hicks from FREDsense was a member of the 2012 iGEM Calgary team where she, along with her teammates, turned their project into a company after the Jamboree. Emily highlighted the obstacles FREDsense faced in terms of funding the company and acquiring support.
• University of Calgary law student Jason Arnason gave an informative presentation about acquiring patents and protecting intellectual property. Our team had very limited knowledge on this topic when we started our project this year, so we wanted to ensure other teams got the information they needed to protect their ideas as well.
• Swapan Kakumanu- Co-Founder of the consulting firm Red to Black Inc provided his expertise on how to finance start-ups and navigate the market when creating a new product. He talked about the different funding options available to start-ups and how to reach out to investors.

The later half of our event was focused on building camaraderie, creating a network of support, and starting collaborations between the Alberta iGEM teams. We organized social activities and games to accomplish this, and provided guiding questions for the initiation of collaborations.

We consider JulyGEM a success, as we accomplished many of the goals we initially set. A survey was sent to all attendees after the event, many of whom commended the entrepreneurial insight and information provided by speakers. Particularly, the presentation on IP protection and patent acquisition were mentioned to be very valuable. Additionally, our goal of building camaraderie and support amongst teams was accomplished through our social events.

Despite our successes, there are some areas for improvement. Extending the event over two days may have allowed us to further accomplish our goals and add other elements which may have helped the teams. Workshops on pitching and specific elements of entrepreneurship may have been more helpful for the teams. One-on-one time with the speakers may have fostered better conversation, as the speaker presentations were stylized as lectures rather than discussions. Finally, we realized that this event may not have been the best opportunity for forming collaborations, which was one of our main goals for the event. In the future, it may be valuable to add a more formal workshop specifically for collaborations if that continues to be one of the event’s goals.

As part of our education and outreach work, we created an intro to synthetic biology educational package. Our team rolled out the package as a for-credit university level course, but we thought that iGEM teams would find it useful for training their new members. We collaborated with Waterloo, KCL, CU iGEM, iGEM Rain, and Concordia-Montreal iGEM teams by sending them our package as a training tool in exchange for feedback on its content and structure.
Feedback received from participating teams is currently being consolodated and

Once the semester concluded, the team discussed the course’s pros and cons with the ultimate goal of improving content. Wet lab members applauded the instruction of genetic engineering principles but desired more lab practice, and dry lab members expressed the need for protein modeling and machine learning in course content. In an effort to further improve content, we consolidated our content into an that was sent to a number of iGEM teams across the world, including Waterloo, KCL, CU iGEM, iGEM Rain, and Concordia-Montreal. Their feedback will be integrated into the final package and MDSC 507 will run again in the winter semester for iGEM Calgary 2020 members with the improved course content.

In the long term, the team hopes to open the course to students outside of iGEM as regular course for all university students, and to kickstart its implementation at other universities.

Our team went there and learned stuff

Alberta's regional synthetic biology competition, aGEM, was held by the University of Alberta, in conjunction with geekstarter. This collaboration with the UAlberta team involves bringing together all of the Albertan iGEM teams. The conference allows iGEM teams in Alberta, to gather for a mock iGEM experience, by having each team present, participate in workshops, and work together to improve. Enjoying our time and fruiting collaborations were great results of aGEM 2019.

To decompress and promote unity in the iGEM community, we participated in numerous small socials. Such as

• Queen's video - SARA
• With the help of the Connecticut team, we sent and received socks from a mystery team. We sent out very nice socks to our assigned team, but unfortunately received dirty socks from our sender. If you also received dirty socks, we'd like to hear about it! Contact us at igem.calgary@gmail.com.

• Responding to Duesseldorf's call for post-cards, we designed and sent post-cards to Duesseldorf. We would have loved to have received other team's postcards, but someone might have intercepted the beautiful pieces of art, within our lab.

• We contributed our protocols to the shared UOttawa protocol bank to help iGEM teams.
• SDG, Sustainable Development Goals - we selected decent work and economic growth - industry inovation and architecture - responsible consumption and production - partnerships for the goals.
• We reached out to the UAlberta iGEM team by sending them an economic model that encompasses their 2018 project to understand industrial monetary ramifications of their project. This was done in the hopes of creating a strong economic model that ties their agricultural solution with ours. This was not completed bby either team.
• We reached out to the UWaterloo iGEM team to collaborate on a project to visualize iGEM team metadata. Specifically, the aim of the project was to map collaborations between iGEM teams and topics they worked on. We worked on scraping the iGEM wikis using BeautifulSoup in Python, which UWaterloo built off for interactive visualization at [INSERT LINK].