Introduction
While our team of course focused on completing the lab aspects of our project, we also considered outreach to be an important part of the iGEM experience. Hence, we took many different routes to connect to the outside world. We wanted to make iGEM a more well-known name at KU Leuven and in Belgium in general. This would help future teams with their projects, but also with recruiting and fundraising among other things. We wanted to inspire the community at large, educating the public about science and synthetic biology in particular, as well as our own project.
Presence at Events
Probably the most obvious way to do outreach is to be physically present at events targeted at a broader audience. We’re very happy to say that we attended several of those, ranging from small to large, to promote iGEM, synthetic biology, and our project itself.
Technovation Hub Event
Technovation Hub is a nonprofit organization related to KU Leuven that aims at supporting student teams through advice and a network. They organize a yearly event simply called the Technovation Hub event where iGEM was present as well. We got to present ourselves and give a workshop about a topic of choice. Around that time, we were still in the early phase of the project, meaning that we were still optimizing how to manage our team as efficiently as possible. Therefore, we reached out to an expert who advised us about effective team management through agile practices in research projects like ours (read more about our meeting in the Experts section here!) Because the workshop was aimed towards other student teams, we thought it would be very helpful to convey our knowledge on the topic of Agile and on how to implement this in research management to the other student teams. We also had our own booth to talk to people about synthetic biology and the iGEM competition. We also got to talk to the other teams and gained insightful information this way. All in all, it was a nice opportunity to build meaningful connections with our fellow student teams and increase the notoriety of iGEM in Leuven!
International Microorganisms Day
Microorganisms Day was an event organized by the Young Belgium Society for Microbiology (YBSM) that took place on the 16th of September in the museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels. It consisted of several stands visited by hundreds of people that were there for the occasion or were just visiting the museum anyway. We had our own stand about our project in particular, but we also helped set up the stand “Meet our friends”. Our own stand had two posters. The first was about how microbes are used for cleaning wastewater and plastic, and our second poster was of course about our own project in particular. Our team also designed and made a plasmid puzzle to explain to the public (and especially to kids) how the basics of synthetic biology work (what a promotor, a gene sequence, and so forth are). We also brought two 3D printed DNA polymerases to show what an actual protein looks like. Additionally, we put the strains we worked with (Yarrowia lipolytica, S. cerevisae and E. coli) on display. As you can see, the kids loved our plasmid puzzle!
The “meet our friends” stand that we helped set up was all about explaining to the public what microorganisms surround us, why some are good and others are bad, and to give some explanation on what they’re used for. We helped by looking for names, descriptions, and electron microscopy pictures of organisms that we encounter daily, such as the ones used to make yogurt (Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. Bulgaricus).
It was very exciting to explain synthetic biology and our project to so many interested people. We learned a lot about how to tackle the challenge of explaining the same concept to different age groups and people from all walks of life. It was a very rewarding day for the team and we hope to have excited the audience about synthetic biology in the same way that we are.
MedTech Event
These events described previously were already a lot of fun and truly helped us connect with the community, but we weren’t done yet. In collaboration with student-organization Academics for Technology (AFT), iGEM KU Leuven co-organizes the yearly MedTech Convention. It is scheduled on the 23rd of November 2023 at the great University Halls in Leuven. Last year, 411 students were registered to join, so it goes without saying that it is a huge event!
Our team is involved in organizing the event from start to finish. This means we organize recruitment of companies, logistics, budgeting, even picking a theme, and so forth! This year’s theme will be medical imaging, oncology and AI!
The event gathers professionals, innovators, and a large group of students with a wide range of backgrounds to discuss innovative technologies in healthcare. Five keynote speakers have the privilege to take the stage and speak about their innovations. Afterwards, there is a booth session where approximately 15 companies have a booth where they display their technological advances. This huge networking events attracts students from all diferent faculties, mostly medicine and engineering students (mostly MSc students). PhD students are also regular visitors. At MedTech, companies have the opportunity to talk to hundreds of students with an interest in biomedical technology. Besides recruitment, it is also a place for companies to foster meaningful collaborations. It is also a place for companies to increase their visibility in general.
With MedTech, we are shaping the discourse on healthcare innovation and will hopefully inspire fellow students with the newest healthcare innovations as put forward by our partner companies!
Science Day
These events described previously were already a lot of fun and truly helped us connect with the community, but we aren’t done yet. Next up is the science day on the 26th of November (organized by KU Leuven and Technopolis), where we will have a stand very similar to the one on the microorganisms day. The difference is that this is a huge event that attracts many families from Flanders (the North region of Belgium). We are very much looking forward to being present there as well, despite the fact that this technically falls outside of the iGEM competition.
Presence in the Media
Presence at events is crucial to do good outreach and to interact with people face-to-face, but the amount of people that we reach is still always relatively limited. It is for this reason that our team actively attempted to reach out to even more people through several media channels, again ranging from small to large.
Article in ConnectING
ConnectING is a magazine published by the faculty of industrial engineers of the KU Leuven. Yves Persoons, a professor at said faculty, wrote an article about us to promote our project and potentially attract more industrial engineers to join our team next year. It was interesting discussing our project during an interview for the first time, and it was an excellent practice for what was still to come. We unfortunately do not have any pictures right now, as it will be published on the 20th of October. Thanks to Siska Waelkens, we will get to publish a very similar piece in the magazine for the faculty of science at the KU Leuven as well, but this was arranged much later (it’ll only be published in November).
MijnLeuven Item
MijnLeuven is a youth organization from the city of Leuven that mainly targets teenagers. They have a relatively large following on social media (in the thousands), and we thought that it would be very inspiring if we collaborated with them. They ended up coming to the lab and filming us, which was a very cool experience for everyone involved! It also was an excellent exercise in science communication for us. Adapting our speech for it to be understandable for laymen took practice, and it made us realize that good science communication really is a challenge.
ROBtv Item
ROBtv is a local news channel covering mainly the province of Flemish Brabant. They have tens of thousands of followers, so we were very happy that they were willing to do an item about our project. It was soon arranged, and a reporter came to the lab to interview and film us. Again, this was an excellent exercise in science communication, and it was incredibly interesting and inspiring for us to practice this essential skill.
Project Promotion Video
Introducing our audience to our project through a promotion video was of course a mandatory iGEM requirement, and we greatly enjoyed doing it – feel free to check out below how YarroWCO aims to transform the world around us. We also filmed the last shots of the video in a very special location, so we suggest you watch until the end!
Activities Described on Other Pages
It is sometimes hard to draw very clear distinctions between the different sections of an iGEM wiki, and this is definitely the case for outreach activities. According to the Cambridge dictionary, outreach is “an effort to bring services or information to people where they live or spend time”. This means that every time that we talked about our project or that we brought services to people related to our project, we were essentially doing outreach.
Thus, we finish this page with some honourable mentions that are already documented on other sections of the wiki. They include our visit to the secondary school Atheneum De Ring (Education page), our discussions with authorities and experts, the creation of the oil collection point, the poster for the fries museum (Integrated Human Practices page), and in a sense even our collaborations with the other iGEM teams
Conclusion
Doing outreach was incredibly inspiring for us, and we’re convinced that the same goes for the people that we interacted with. Our presence at events showed people from outside academia what science at large, and synthetic biology in particular, actually looks like. It engaged audiences on social media and demonstrated what synthetic biology can do and what impact it can have. We think that our actions in this regard will have paved a path for the next KU Leuven team, leaving resources and knowledge that they can use to expand these activities even further.
On a deeper note, we live in a time of rising science denial and conspiracy theories involving science. It is for this reason that doing these outreach activities was also important to each of us on a personal level. We believe that it is every scientist’s job to combat the rise of science illiteracy and denial. We also believe that the way to do this is to show the public what science truly is and who scientists truly are, all while educating people about certain scientific topics. After all, there is no better way to combat misinformation that by good, well-funded information. We’re grateful that our iGEM adventure gave us the opportunity to do this, and we all hope to do more of this in our future careers as scientists.
Social Media
For this year, iGEM KU Leuven Team 2023 was active on four social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. These platforms served to inform the general public regarding our project. Information was distributed regularly (weekly, most of the time). The information was made to be engaging by using different formats and features available on the social media platforms. The goal was always to grab the readers’ attention in order to reach out to as many people as possible. This would lead to an increase in the awareness of the public regarding our project and the problem we tried to solve. The following two sections give more details about our social media platforms.
Activities and Project Information
This type of information revolved around the project description, what we did (regarding the project and outside the project), as well as the project’s progress. We also posted information about the activities that we organized and joined that served as outreach for our project. Showing this information was important to us because it demonstrated our efforts towards reaching our goals to the general public. Furthermore, these posts allowed us to reach a worldwide audience that could be potentially interested in our cause and the project. Some key posts were: project description in comic format, “What’s YarroWCO Been Up To?” series, Instagram takeovers, and many more.
General Knowledge for the Public
This type of information served to educate the public about knowledge that surrounds our project. We realized that our project is too complex to be understood in just a few paragraphs by laymen. Thus, in order to allow people really understand our project, we also put out some posts about general background knowledge.
This information was delivered in a format that was as digestible as possible for people of all age groups and backgrounds. Some of these posts included: “Can yeast produce medicine?”, “What can we do with waste cooking oil?”, “What are steroidal drugs?”.