COLLABORATION

MEET UPS

MEET UPS: Throughout the project we have embarked on many collaborations with teams on different aspects of our project. We kick-started our collaboration by attending the Oxford iGEM Meet Up on Thursday, 19th June 2014.. This was a great day with interesting talks from guest speakers giving us insight into the project. We were then able to meet the British and Irish iGEM teams attending over a poster session to establish links with one another. As it was early on in the project timeline, it was useful to see where projects were heading and also the variety of issues being tackled using synthetic biology.
From this, we decided to hold our own meet up on Friday, 18th July 2014, a month after the previous meet up. We felt that this would be a great time for us to solidify and identify specific areas and ideas on which we could collaborate with other teams as everyone had started their lab work by this point. We hosted 4 teams from across England: Kent, Norwich-UEA, Oxford and York and had a very successful day. Firstly, we had presentations from two guest speakers from the University of Sheffield: Professor Phillip C. Wright (link to bio on team page) (Head of Chemical and Biological Engineering) who spoke about his views and perceptions of the development of synthetic biology and Robert Meckin (Doctoral Researcher, Science and Technology Studies) who gave an insight into human practices surrounding synthetic biology. An icebreaker involving human bingo allowed us to find out more about each other before a poster session and finally, a more relaxed evening with drinks. We had a great time hosting the teams and hope they did too! Below is a video to show a summary of the events that took place:

Finally, we attended YSB 2.0 and UCL meet up held on Monday 1st – Tuesday 2nd September 2014 where we were given the opportunity to present a poster as well as presentation on the development of our project over the summer. It was great to see all of the hard work that teams had put in and boosted our excitement for the Giant Jamboree where we will be seeing all of the other presentations.