Introduction on Synthetic biology at the Burier highschool Montreux. We gave a lecture for 2nd year students in an artistic track that had little or no background in biology. Overall the lecture went well. We asked them to imagine a few ideas what might be possible with synthetic biology after the presentation and the answers that came out were “interesting.” The involvement of designers and other visually oriented fields in our projects might give an overall aesthetic sense that might otherwise be absent, our artistic talents being quite limited for the most part.

Presentation on synthetic biology at Beaulieu Highschool Lausanne for two classes of 2nd year students, this time with a scientific orientation (extra classes in biology and chemistry). The response was also quite enthusiastic. Students were curious about the engineering approach to biological systems and the question and answer session lasted a while.

Presentation at the SSBE. This year the SSBE (swiss society for biological engineers) held it's annual conference at the EPFL. We gave a short presentation on our project which was geared more towards people that had an in depth knowledge of molecular biology. The team from EPFZ was also there and 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...