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 of their ignorance 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 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 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.

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 very enthusiastic. Students were curious about the engineering approach to biological systems and the question and answer session lasted a while.

27th of August : 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 ETH Zurich 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...

We exchanged many ideas on how we could model our photosentitive proteins and what experimental setup we could use for our purposes (E.Coli vs. mammalian expression). We kept in touch through emails and we actually want the #SwissIgemMeetup to be a thing!