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Team:Brown/Human Practices/Outreach
From 2010.igem.org
Community Outreach
Summer Workshops
During Summer 2010, we partnered with five classes in the Summer@Brown high school program to provide guest lectures. Our audiences consisted of several dozen high schoolers who expressed interest in engineering an/or biotechnology. We introduced synthetic biology and some of our research, while also sharing about the iGEM competition and the premise of the BioBrick standardization movement. We received many insightful questions about our work and about life in general as a researcher. Many of these students later arranged to visit our lab, where we showed them some of the procedures we carried out and got to talk about our personal experiences with science and Brown University.
Poster session
We presented 2 posters to the Providence and Brown community at our end-of-summer research symposium: one on the iGEM competition and the field of Synthetic Biology, and one on our iGEM projects this year. Students and professors alike showed a great level of interest in both our project and the iGEM program as a whole. We got a lot of useful feedback and had a chance to connect with other biology labs at Brown.
Activities Fair
Each fall, Brown holds an activities fair featuring student organizations on campus. Nearly the entire ~1500 person freshman class attends this fair, along with significant portions of the rest of the student body. We presented a poster on our project(s) and a poster on the entire iGEM program at this fair, talking to innumerable interested students about our research and the structure of iGEM. We have built an email list of over 70 interested students, who are being kept up to date with our progress and will be encouraged to apply for our iGEM team next year. By creating a community of students aware of and interested in the iGEM competition, we can keep Brown iGEM strong in the years to come!
