Team:Korea U Seoul/Human Practice/Sharing

     Creative Challenger Program (CCP) is a Korea University program that is dedicated to promote creativity in undergraduates by letting them form groups and engage in self-designed projects, while providing them with a suitable environment. It is sponsored by Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), and they carefully observe, judge teams and their projects, while providing support. Topics for projects include natural sciences, liberal arts/society, culture/art/sports, economics/management, and engineering/information technology. Despite the wide range of topics, teams are encouraged to associate, making this program a center for idea sharing. Korea U Seoul has participated in CCP since 2010, and through this program, we have been able to spread information about iGEM and Synthetic Biology. In January and September of every year, all the teams and each teams' advisors gather together and have a question and answer session. Doing so, we could share our topics and advance it further. Job-Ara team which participates in CCP has asked us if we could provide an orientation about our project and a lab tour for their students (for primary, middle, highschool students) job search program. We are reviewing the offer currently. What we have now to look forward to is the January final presentation and poster presentation. Korea U Seoul team will continue to perform research for better results even after iGEM is over.

     On August 13, our team member Haerim introduced iGEM to the students who participated in the Korea University Science camp for middle school young scientists. She prepared presentation and explained what synthetic biology is and what we do in iGEM competition. The students showed curiosity and gave lots of questions. They were surprised to know that there is an international jamboree in which people all around the world get together, having a festival to share their academic interests.

     During February, Sanghoon, Haerim and Jinsik(one of the 2011 iGEM Korea U Seoulteam members) participated in a presentation competition held by Seoul National University. We made a presentation on synthetic biology, reasoning why we have to invest in this field and reporting the current state of Korea. We mentioned iGEM competition showing that there are increasing interests in synthetic biology area. We made a good result and advanced to the finals.

     Every member of Korea U Seoul actively participated in survey held by British Columbia University. The survey was about patent.

    < A letter from Byunguk Kang(the observer student) >

     Ever since I went to a science camp and met KAIST iGEM team there, I had a great interest in the field of synthetic biology, and registered for 'high school iGEM competition' this year. However, because our team was not able to get support from other laboratories nearby that we asked, our team could not complete our project and could not participate in the jamboree. I kept on researching, and finally sent an e-mail to professor Choi of Computational and Synthetic Biology Lab at Korea University, to have some research experiences. Thankfully, professor Choi and the faculty members of the laboratory provided me a great opportunity to serve as an intern during summer vacation to learn all the basic protocols and experiments on synthetic biology. While I received extensive training, professor Choi allowed me to join the "Korea U Seoul" iGEM team, as a high school observer. I summarized the basic project idea and presented at the lab meeting, and partly involved in PCR and assembly procedure of the project. Through such unique and beneficial experience, I can now design a workable device, (currently conducting personal biosensor research as first author) and get the big picture of how engineers and scientists realize their ideas. I am also willing to participate collegiate iGEM competition next year when I go tocollege. I thank everyone who has given me this great opportunity.