Educational Outreach

Andover High BioBuilders

In early June, a member of our wet lab team visited Andover High School’s BioBuilder club to deliver a presentation on our iGEM team and give an overview on our project to an audience of high school students.

At the event we promoted synthetic biology, highlighting the growing prevalence of genetically engineered organisms and its effects on society’s future.

John Abbott CEGEP

In early April, we partnered with the McGill BioDesign team to deliver a series of seminars on synthetic biology and the field of bioengineering to pre-college students at a local school.

During the Q&A event afterwards, we answered questions on sustainable bioengineering and applications of our science in the real world.

Demo Days

In July, our team hosted the “McGill iGEM Demo Days” at our lab to explain our current project to industry professionals and the general public, as well as allow non-biologists to try their hand at common wet lab practices, such as gel electrophoresis.

We developed simplified posters explaining the science behind our project, making sure to create easily understandable material that could be presented to lay audiences.

McGill University Synbio Course

Motivated by the lack of proper integrated synthetic biology education at McGill University, the McGill iGEM team sought to create a lecture-based for-credit course available to McGill undergraduate students.

Through months of planning with the McGill Faculty of Medicine education committee and regular meetings with the dean of education to discuss the course, this course will come into fruition during the Winter 2022 semester as a required course under the biotechnology minor at McGill.

Throughout the semester, we also filmed these lab tutorials and launched them on YouTube, allowing others to view and learn from them.

Educational Video Initiative

Our expert consultation with Zbiotics helped us realize how little the general public knows about both probiotics and GMOs, let alone GMO probiotics.

To address this, McGill iGEM created an educational video as part of an initiative to reduce misinformation on GMOs and to educate people about the emerging field of GMO probiotics.

This video has been tailored to primary and secondary school students. We plan to launch a pilot in several junior high and high schools before releasing our video throughout the US and Canada alongside other simplified pamphlets and videos to be used as an educational tool alongside standardized curriculum.

STEMcast Podcast

To address gaps in knowledge that younger students had when pursuing scientific careers, we created the STEMcast podcast, which interviewed scientists in different fields and posed questions about how they reached certain milestones in their careers.

As a part of our commitment to global health and combating misinformation, our first guest of season two was Dr. Joanne Liu, former president of Doctors Without Borders. Episodes can be streamed via Spotify.