This summer, Abdullah, our outreach coordinator, planned several activities in which we engaged the community in learning and discussing synthetic biology. Our aim for these outreach events was to make the field of synthetic biology more accessible and understandable to people of all ages and backgrounds.

We accomplished this by giving 45-minute PowerPoint presentations to a range of audiences; from incoming Northwestern freshmen interested in further pursuing biology as a career or major, to eighth graders eager to more about the field. This presentation offered an introduction on iGEM as well as an interactive discussion on what synthetic biology. We then delved further into the field’s fundamentals, briefly covering both how DNA acts as the blueprint of life and how its manipulation can lead to significant advances in science. After sharing this year’s Northwestern project on Non-model organism and cell-free systems, we gave the audience a chance to tackle any problem in society through the use of synthetic biology. The feedback of the audience throughout the presentation, as well as from examining the surveys that we asked them to fill out, was overwhelmingly positive; we feel that synthetic biology has become a much more comprehensible concept to our audiences, and consequently, an even more powerful tool for the scientific field.

Roycemore

In collaboration with CTD (Center for Talent Development) through Roycemore college preparatory school, we were able to mentor middle school students with their honors biology topics. The CTD professor was very impressed at how quickly the students were able to pick up the information with our guidance

BioExcel

We also partnered with BioExcel, where students were working on their own synthetic biology projects dealing with issues such as HIV/AIDS, environmental protection, and other medical diseases. We served as advisors to these various groups of motivated incoming Northwestern freshman by reviewing and refining their projects.

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