Team:Macquarie Australia/Outreach/Undergrad

Launching in 2014, the Macquarie University Undergraduate Research Internship (MURI) offers 10 undergraduate students from equity backgrounds the wonderful opportunity to design and research a project of their choosing, whilst being guided and mentored by academics from the University. Since its inception this year, the MURInterns have succeeded in making phenomenal progress in their own projects and cover diverse areas ranging from psychology to history.

Why plan a collaboration?

The Macquarie University iGEM 2014 team strongly believes that communication of research to peers (particularly peers from non-science backgrounds) allows for a useful constructive criticism. Furthermore, creating a platform where student researchers are able to share their work enriches the culture of undergraduate research within the University and fosters goodwill amongst student researchers from various disciplines. In addition, communicating our researchers to talented peers from other disciplines allowed us to tap into their vast kernel of knowledge in order to evaluate how our project and Synthetic Biology in general is placed within a broader context.

What was the process and outcome of such collaboration?

On 3rd October, 2014 ten MURInterns visited the labs occupied by Macquaire University iGEM 2014 team for an hour long undergraduate research chat. Student researchers from both MURI and Macquarie iGEM teams shared details of their projects and discussed their research journeys. More importantly, MURInterns were able to use their expertise on areas of science ethics, history, psychology, law and social justice to provide useful insights into the commercial applications of our project, ethics of open source research and concerns regarding student-led Synthetic biology research. The collaborative exercise served two major purposes:

• The stimulating and reflective nature of this dialogue with the MURInterns enabled us to understand a complete different set of perspectives regarding how Synthetic Biologists are viewed by non-experts.
• The speculative aspect of the dialogue served to elucidate the expectations and fears generally educated public have regarding novel research in Synthetic Biology.

Overall, the exercise served to deepen our understanding of the place our own project and the field of Synthetic Biology has in wider society. Furthermore, we are now armed with visions of the future from non-experts to mobilize support towards user driven innovation in Synthetic Biology in the near future.

Here’s a glimpse of what the MURInterns had to say about our project and Synthetic Biology in general: