Student Fair

Our first exposure to the public was at the 26th International Fair for books and press of Geneva, 25-29 April 2012, in which there was a part dedicated to student formation. Various Swiss universities held a stand at the fair including Geneva, Fribourg, EFPL and Swiss Italian universities.

We made a presentation about synthetic biology, iGEM and our project at the EPFL stand which was visited by prospective students of all ages as well as curious parents. We stood by the poster in order to answer questions and hand out surveys on synthetic biology to evaluate the awareness of people.

People appreciated the concept despite not being too fond of GMOs, mostly because some imprecise knowledge on the subject and publicity. A lot of people linked synthetic biology to textiles.

Burier high school talk

We then held a presentation introducing synthetic biology at the Burier high school in Montreux, Switzerland. We gave a lecture for 2nd year students in an artistic track. They had little to none background in biology. The lecture went well overall. We asked them to imagine a few ideas that might be realizable with synthetic biology after the presentation. The answers that came out were creative and showed they had understood the main points. The involvement of designers and other visually oriented fields in our projects might give an overall aesthetic sense that might otherwise be absent.

Beaulieu high school talk

We gave a presentation on synthetic biology at the Beaulieu high school in Lausanne for two classes of 2nd year students, this time with a scientific orientation (extra classes in biology and chemistry). The response was also very enthusiastic. Students were curious about the engineering approach to biological systems and the question and answer session lasted for a while. It was interesting to notice that these students with a biological background were actually more cautious towards genetic engineering and current pharmaceutical and therapeutical approaches than the art students.

After these three talks, the paper surveys were analyzed.

Online survey at EPFL

We sent our survey about synthetic biology to the whole EPFL student community. We got a very positive response. We compared the results we obtained to the surveys from the talks. You can read the whole study on our Survey page.

SSBE Conference

We were kindly invited by Prof.Maerkl (one of our advisors) to participate to the annual meeting of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering (SSBE). We gave a talk there (download the presentation) and presented a poster (download the poster).

Meetup with ETH Zurich

The team from ETH Zurich was also invited at the SSBE. They gave a presentation on their project. We met up afterwards to talk about our projects and our experiences this summer. It's not very often you can tell jokes about cloning...

We exchanged many ideas on how we could model our photosentitive proteins and what experimental setup we could use for our and their purposes (E.Coli vs. mammalian expression). We thoroughly discussed LovTAP modeling and gave advice to each other about the lighting setup for the LovTAP experiments. We also helped them with parameters for the LovTAP protein model. We kept in touch through emails and we actually want the #SwissIgemMeetup to be a thing!

EU-Korea Conference for Science and Technology in Berlin

One of the team members participated to the EU-Korea Conference for Science and Technology in Berlin. He presented a poster about our project.