Team:Exeter/Presentations

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Exeter | ERASE

Presentations

Aims

Throughout our project we have aimed to make our work as transparent and open to feedback as possible. Further to contacting stakeholders, we also held a number of talks directed at various audiences. Though the style of these talks varied depending on the audience, the underlying aim was to present our project in a way that enabled understanding and encouraged feedback. Our preliminary presentations in the early stages of our project were very feedback focused. Some examples of this are:

  • Project Focus Presentation: A presentation to a selection of faculty members across the CEMPS department. The presentation was a culmination of our three potential projects, each presented by a different member of the group. After the three proposals had been presented, we invited discussion and criticism from the audience. This feedback was incredibly useful, as it not only helped us decide on our project focus, but also alerted us to potential stakeholders and contacts within the department.
  • Exeter Synbio Conference: The iGEM team was invited to talk at the annual synbio conference held at the University. The conference is an annual meet-up of people across the University and Devon to discuss the research going on in synthetic biology. This is particularly important, not only to raise awareness for projects, funding and regulations, but also to promote collaboration between projects and organisations. As the conference took place a week into our initial experiments, we were unable to present concrete results but rather used the opportunity to promote the key concepts of the project. During the informal discussion time after the presentations, we met a number of interested parties who were able to offer advice on laws and regulations, synbio theory, monetisation and other potential stakeholders.
  • Young Scientist Open Day: A conference designed to spark an interest in science for young people, with the aim of encouraging them to pursue science at University and beyond. We were invited to talk not only to promote our project, but also to demonstrate the exciting opportunities studying a science subject can lead to. The talk was our largest to date, with over 150 students present.
  • GW4 South-West synthetic biology conference: A conference of synthetic biology experts from the top 4 universities in the southwest alongside commercial stakeholders. Presentations focused on the individual parties' areas of research/industry and we were able to contribute to this with a presentation on our work with iGEM (including our preliminary results). This was incredibly useful to us as we were able to get feedback on our project at a more recent stage. We were also directed to new contacts and stakeholders, which allowed us to view the project in new ways.

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