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This year our iGEM team was interested in giving opportunities for students from different countries to contribute to the progress of our project. We believe that this was an ideal situation for high school students to get involved in iGEM competition and develop skills that they might have not acquired within their classrooms. We reached to Bosnian Gymnasium in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and we were approved to introduce students to our project. Firstly, our member who is from Bosnia and Herzegovina held an in person session on what iGEM is and what NYUAD's project is about. This information session aimed not only to gain interest of students but also to encourage high schools to apply for iGEM competition. Furthermore, we approached students interested in computer science and engineering and enabled them to shadow our CS team when developing our ADx app. Firstly, a few of them showed interest to accompany us during our meetings and gain some insight into how the project is managed.
We were very proud and impressed that one of the students worked really hard and with help of our teammates developed an app that can help people recover their memories. Idea behind this app is for people to upload their videos and pictures and they will be able to access them periodically as a reminder of their favorite memories. Moreover, this app enables patients to also upload their scans and daily symptoms. Our current goal is to train these students to program an app that would be able to compare scans of normal human brain with one diagnosed with Alzheimer disease.
On April 1st, our team took part in the seventh annual online weSTEM High School Conference. WeSTEM at NYUAD is a student interest group that works on empowering women, non-binary people, and male allies interested in Science, Technology Engineering & Mathematics regardless of their major. The high school conference is a student-led collaborative and locally engaged initiative, designed to promote diversity and female presence in the STEM fields in and beyond the United Arab Emirates. It aims to help high school girls prepare for successful college studies and a career in STEM. By taking part in this initiative our team hoped to encourage and include more people in shaping synthetic biology.
The 2022 weSTEM High School Conference focused on developing basic skill sets for girls who aspire to work in STEM. The conference consisted of a series of sessions focusing on career development within the STEM field as well as workshops that teach basic coding and lab work, and competition meant to encourage teamwork and collaboration. One of those workshops was facilitated by the NYUAD iGEM team.
During the first workshops, participants were introduced to the general topic of synthetic biology and specific topics in that area. Later our team presented information about the iGEM competition, the importance of combining biology with engineering as well as other branches of science. We talked about our past projects and discussed ideas for an upcoming competition. During the second workshop, participants had a chance to gain hands-on lab experience with bacteria transformation. In the beginning, key concepts and information on recombinant DNA technology were introduced, and late participants took part in an online lab simulation on Lab X Change. By using this innovative platform we hope to spark an interest on synthetic biology among high school students and encourage them to explore it on theri own as well. The sessions ended with quick and informal chat with participants about experience in pursuing carrer in STEM, tips and encouragement to join iGEM next year as a high school team.
