Communication

Through research mentoring of high schoolers, our team became inspired to expand our educational initiative into a robust series of lectures on computational biology. The lecture materials included on our Communications page constitute over 15 hours of lecture time. These lectures were presented by our team during the summer and fall, and were open to the public, allowing us to engage with a wide audience of synthetic biology enthusiasts and forcing us to develop science communication material accessible to a wide range of backgrounds.

Education and Communication

At the onset of our project, we sought to find ways to better integrate computational methods into biology research. Through this, we got involved in developing a set of lectures for high school students conducting research at BioSTAR over the summer (which is discussed more on our human practices page).

After this initial experience, we felt compelled to expand our educational initiative and develop a comprehensive set of lectures on synthetic biology principles and computational tools. We built these lectures to be accessible to a wide range of audiences, and invited local students and anyone interested in the Cambridge area to come attend our in-person presentations of these topics. Over the course of the educational lectures series, we got to meet many high school, college, and graduate students from many different backgrounds–all interested in learning more about synthetic biology and computation. We thank all those who came out to learn and engage with our lectures; it was wonderful meeting you all!

Our educational initiative was an extremely rewarding endeavor, and the process of developing these lecture materials and delivering them to a live audience–answering questions and discussing interesting topics along the way–taught us much about science communication and making the important ideas of synthetic biology accessible to as many people as possible.

Our lectures are freely available for all who are interested, and can be downloaded below. If you have any questions, you are always welcome to contact us at crimsonigem@gmail.com.

Session 1: What is Life?

Session 2: Scientific Literature

Session 3: Experimental Design

Wet Lab Session 1: Wet Lab Session 1

Session 4: Biology as an Engineering Discipline

Session 5: Gene Circuit Design

Session 6: Biological Data Analysis

Wet Lab Session 2: Wet Lab Session 2

Session 7: Bioengineering Techniques

Session 8: Final Session & Concluding Remarks

Unfortunately, we are unable to upload .pptx files to the iGEM web servers, so these presentations are provided in .pdf form. As a result, the notes or explanations of certain slides are unavailable in the pdf format, since these explanations were part of the slide notes in the pptx file. However, feel free to email us with any questions, and we are happy to provide the .pptx versions of the files upon request!

As a final note, our members underwent CITI training prior to this educational work, and remained in constant contact with Harvard SEAS and Harvard's internal ethics review board to ensure our work maintained the highest ethical and safety standards. Further information regarding our committment to ethical human practices and educational work can be found on our human practies page.

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