Team:Carnegie Mellon/Our Projects

     The Carnegie Mellon University 2014 iGEM team spent hundreds of hours teaching students, teachers, and community members about synthetic biology and endocrine disruptors and researching policies, ethics and impacts involved in the latter. We collaborated with other teams to heighten awareness of synthetic biology and promote a scientific interface between the lab and society, while working on a project that will help detect for micropollutants, such as estrogen/estradiol, in water sources cost-efficiently. Our project directly affected how we saw Policies & Practices as a way to start an initiative dedicated to going past the benchmark that limits science classrooms and literacy across America.

• Created Beyond the Bench[mark]; an initiative to educate middle and high school students on synthetic biology and endocrine disruptors

• Presented at 12 events for beta-testing the SynBio Educational Series and raising awareness about our iGEM research on endocrine disruptors

• Set up 3 interviews with experts in endocrine disruptors, water testing, micropollutants, and synthetic biology public outreach

• Delved into the controversial world that is policies, ethics and impacts around endocrine disruptors

• Hosted our first iGEM Meetup with 5 North American teams in attendance, including one high school team from Montgomery, NJ

• Public Outreach with 490 people in first 120 days and a scheduled 625 in the next 120 days

The 7 areas in which the Carnegie Mellon iGEM team worked on are

• Beyond the Bench[mark] Initiative

• SynBio Educational Series in partnership with DNAZone

• Team Collaborations and an iGEM Meetup

• Project Presentations and Educational Events

• Interviews with 3 Experts

• Ethics and Impacts of endocrine disruptors

• Policies surrounding micropollutants

• 243 presentation man-Hours between all 7 team members

• 563 people whom we have reached so far with the SynBio Educational Series

• 5 classroom labs prepared for distribution through DNAZone, of which 2 were specifically meant for the Beyond the Bench[mark] Initiative

• 16 workshops, events, presentations to date

• 1 (First) CMU iGEM Meetup with 5 iGEM teams

• 2 Languages that the extraction kits are in in: English and Spanish

• 7 iGEM Teams with which we collaborated or met up with

• 1,046 Total Miles Driven by iGEM Teams to CMU

• 523 Labs completed from the SynBio Educational Series

• 380 Number of Extraction Cards printed out and distributed

• 3 kits mailed out to different cities around the US and internationally

• 4,172 miles between Pittsburgh and Santa Cruz, Bolivia: furthest distance a kit has been mailed out to

• 86 followers on Twitter @CMUiGEM from over 50 different countries!

We truly hope that our work affected the world with our educational advances in synthetic biology and endocrine disruptors because we know that the world directly affected our work. Our university's founder Andrew Carnegie said, “My heart is in the work” and Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh further acknowledged, “Our work is from the heart.” There is no doubt that policies & practices widened our horizons this summer and helped us connect back to the community we live in. It was our pleasure to work in this division this year.