Skype Chats!

     Despite the fact the conversation happened between Sao Carlos (Brasil) and Oslo (Norway) this conversation was spoken in portuguese! Izadora is a brazilian student living in Oslo. We exchanged experiences about the struggle to assemble a team, and what are the different difficulties we had during the project development. It was really interesting clashing this contrasting experiences of living an iGEM competition.

The Visit!

     On April 24, 2014, our team was visited by Dr. Carlos Gustavo Nunes Silva, Instructor of the Federal University of Amazonas Team (UFAM_Brazil). He presented his experience in previous editions of the iGEM competition, ongoing projects, and gave us important advices. Dr. Nunes Silva also spoke about the philosophy of the competition and teamwork, and how iGEM initiative enhances the training of young researchers. This networking was crucial -- he questioned us about our skills and lab infrastructure, and thus, we realized we had real conditions to participate in iGEM 2014. Here we are!

iGEM Teams collaborating with our survey!

     Our survey was also applied to virtually all iGEM Teams and other Universities worldwide, with representation from every continent. To date, we have received 64 responses out of Brazil, from all five continents, as follows:

Africa (Egypt), America (USA, Canada, Mexico), Asia (Israel, ​Japan), Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands​, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom), Oceania (Australia, New Zealand).

     Interestingly, 22 respondents are freshmen or sophomores.

     Unfortunately the number of responses coming from abroad is still low, small, and this prevents us from performing a statistical analysis with consistency and validity. To have a more precise analysis, we are planing to apply our survey in a larger sample, so that we can compare these result against data collected in Brazil.

     We want to highlight that members of 26 iGEM Teams collaborated with us and responded to our survey:

The University of Dundee
Aix-Marseille University
Carnegie Mellon University
ITESM-CEM
ITESM Guadalajara
Colorado State University
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Université Paris-Sud
University of California Berkeley
University of Groningen
Cornell University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
INSA-LYON
Macquarie University
University of Warwick
University of Valencia
Wageningen University
Polytechnic University of Valencia
University of Michigan
University of York
University of Warsaw
University of Edinburgh
University of Colorado
Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
Université d'Evry-Val-d'Essonne.