This year, iGEM Uni Hamburg hosted the European Meetup from the 1st to 3rd of July. With 70 participants from 16 international teams we had a lot of fun and learned a lot. Our advisors, having experienced great meetups in their time in 2018 and 2019, were the driving force in organizing the meetup.
Our Meetup
The schedule of the European Meetup contained many different events. Interesting talks of renowned synthetic biologists from all over Europe gave inspiration on what we can do with synthetic biology.
Just as inspiring were the short elevator pitches that all the teams presented. Through the pitches everyone got an overview of what all the projects are about and had some orientation for our poster sessions.
Some pitches were even changed shortly before in a workshop given by the German Association for Synthetic Biology (GASB). In parallel, there were many other workshops with topics ranging from breathing techniques and yoga, a tour through our event location DESY to human practices and safety in iGEM.
To not be overwhelmed by this input and also get to know the other teams personally, we spent a nice evening at the beach and had a small rallye full of lab games. We are very happy to have had the chance to meet all those great teams and organize this event! If you would like to get an impression of what it was like, check out our video!
Collaboration with Toulouse and Münster
As we experienced during the organization of our meetup, there are a lot of things that need to be taken care of and oftentimes you find yourself facing a problem that you didn’t expect. To help future meetup organizing committees overcome some of those difficulties more easily, we collaborated with iGEM Toulouse and iGEM Münster. We started off with collecting all our experiences and those of iGEM Toulouse in a preliminary document and gave iGEM Münster advice based on what we experienced. iGEM Münster could implement our input in their meetup planning and afterwards complement the “How to meetup guide” by filling in all the information that would have helped even further by knowing it in advance. This guide is the first of its kind and now available to all future teams organizing a meetup. It can be accessed through our wiki pages, the official iGEM Meetups page and iGEM Pheonix Project.
