A very important part of the project is being able to communicate to society how we have carried out the project and also the objective of the project, that is, how our project can help humanity. Something that is necessary is to communicate our project to the people who live around us so that they can learn about advances that are starting to be made in science. But something that is also important in a competition is that we can learn about the projects of the other teams, either through Meetups or in other ways that the team creates to achieve this goal.
We have been part of several Meetups, in which we have had the opportunity both to present our project to professionals and other iGEM teams and to learn about the projects of many other teams.
The first Meetup that we were part of, was on the days 22 to 24 of July, organized by the iGEM team from Barcelona, Barcelona_UB, where the different teams that participated in the online Meetup presented the evolution of the first days of summer with the project. Apart from our team, others presented too: Ionis_Paris(@igem.ionis), GO_Paris_Saclay(@igemgoparissaclay, Bilkent_UNAM(@bikentunamigem), Patras(@igem.patras), Patras_Medicine (@patras.med), UMA_MALAGA(@starchstem_igem), UPNAvarra_Spain(@igem_upna2022) and Thessaloniki(@igem.thessaloniki)
The next Meetup we participated in was the Canadian Mini-Jamboree, organized by the Cornell(@cugem), McGill(@igem.mcgill), and Concordia_Montreal(@igem_concordia) teams. We participated on August 20, the event was organized in person and also had an online part, in which a few teams, like ours, were able to present the already completed parts of the project to professionals who have been or are going to be judges in the Grand Jamboree.
From a more local perspective, we had the opportunity to spend one day in person together with the UPNAvarra_Spain (@igem_upna2022) team from the Public University of Navarre. We talked and commented on what participating in iGEM was like. We also had the opportunity to contribute to our experiences in the different phases of the competition. We were able to learn what the iGEM experience looks like from a college team's point of view, just as we taught them the same from a high school team's point of view.
Something new that we decided to do was to have interesting conversations with other teams and professionals but open to the public, in a more modern way through Instagram lives. In the last weeks of the project, we met with different people to learn more about different aspects.
Ainhoa Riera is a biotechnologist that has made a master in vegetal biotechnology. We first met her at one of the events we organized, welcoming the community inside the Planetarium in order to teach them about our project. She participated in iGEM 2021 with the Zaragoza team and, as she was quite interested in our labor, we gathered some information about her and invited her to join us in a live event on Instagram. We had a great time while chatting and sharing our backgrounds in synthetic biology.
We also had the chance to meet a biomedical engineer, Jaume Puig. With a very full background in synthetic biology, Jaume participated in iGEM 2020 in the Barcelona team, he is also an iGEM ambassador and now he is a lead project coordinator at Barcelona Biomedical Research Park. Performing his research in astrobiology he has given us a spare morning in order to meet him and learn about his daily work as a scientist.
The next Instagram live we had was with the company of UMA_MALAGA(@igem_uma), a college team from the University of Malaga and Barcelona_UB(@igemubarcelona), from the University of Barcelona. All of us are part of iGEM, nevertheless, we didn’t talk only about our projects but also about our experiences within iGEM and how we have spent these last months working.
Another person we had the pleasure to meet was Juan Ángel Vaquerizo, an Astrophysicist, and Coordinator of the Education & Public Outreach Dept. ISDEFE for CAB/CSIC-INTA María de Maeztu Excellence Unit Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA). We were really excited to meet him, and we had the opportunity to learn so much from a professional about things we were interested in.
