Dutch iGEM meet

Together with Sowmya Shreedhar of Centre for Living Technologies, iGEM teams TU Eindhoven and Wageningen organized the Dutch iGEM meetup. iGEM teams from Leiden, Wageningen, Delft, Maastricht, and one Belgian team from Leuven attended the event, shared their experiences and created a memorable moment. We oversaw the organization and maintenance of the communication between iGEM teams for this meetup. More about the day can be read in our Communication Section.

Summer Camp NU Kazakhstan

In July, the NU Kazakhstan team contacted us with the announcement that they would organize a summer camp for high school students from Kazakhstan. The team was looking for teams that would help them by giving guest lectures and assignments and we were happy to help them! The team asked us to give a lecture about how our hydrocells could be used in cancer treatment. We made a recorded lecture of 10-15 minutes. We did this because unfortunately, because of the time difference, we were not able to give the lecture live. However, later that day we joined the summer camp online for a Q&A session and to explain the assignment that they worked on the rest of the day. More about the lecture can be found on our Education Page. The students were very enthusiastic and had great input. We would like to thank the NU Kazakstan team for giving us the opportunity to host a guest lecture!

Mini Jamboree Benelux-Germany

The previous iGEM TU-Eindhoven team organized a Mini Jamboree with teams from BeNeLux last year and it was a great succes. We wanted to organize a similar event this year, but make it even bigger by also inviting teams from Germany. Eventually 12 teams ended up subscribing to the event, and also multiple companies and academic stakeholders. The event will be held after the wiki freeze on the 23rd of October. Teams will get a last change to practice their presentation skills before the Grand Jamboree! We are looking forward to it and are very grateful for every party making this event possible! More about the event can be read on our Education & Communication Page.

Survey

To get more information about how society currently feels about synthetic biology and GMOs, we wanted to conduct a survey for the general public. To reach a larger and more diverse audience, we wanted to work together with other iGEM teams. We reached out in the Slack community and the teams of McGill and Exeter wanted to collaborate. Together, we had multiple meetings to come up with the best survey questions and had plans to conduct the survey.

Unfortunately, the ethical review board of one of the universities did not appove of the idea to cunduct a survey in the general public and one of the other teams got too busy with wet lab activities to go out on the street and ask people the questions we came up with. Eventually we decided that we would still conduct the survey by ourselves.