Lethbridge Conference On June 26/27, Alberta Innovates had invited us to attend their student workshop in Lethbridge. Throughout the weekend we were given insight on several areas of our iGEM project. These included marketing, media relations, presentation skills and project ideas and troubleshooting.

The first guest speaker at Lethbridge was Joey Hundert. Joey was an amazing resource because of his expertise in entrepreneurship specifically on the field of sustainable development. He broadened our understanding on approaching companies for sponsorship, especially when marketing to companies about the new and innovative field of synthetic biology. This was incredibly useful for our group as none of the undergraduates had prior experiences with the marketing and sponsorship.

Next speaker was Erin and Bob, Erin (Communication Officer of Alberta Innovates Tech Futures) and Bob (Communications Officer of University of Lethbridge). They offered an insightful presentation on the precautions necessary when speaking to the media. They provided us with advices on how to approach the media while remaining careful with the choice of our words. Our aim is not to scare them but to provide them the information of why were are doing what we are doing and what are the benefits of the public from our findings. They also suggested we contact Grady Simmons who is involved with the media relations for the University of Calgary.

On June 28/2010, our first speaker was Anne Marie Downey. She was a gracious, talented guest speaker who gave us constructive ideas regarding presentation skills. Some of the keypoints of the presentation were Communication skills, Developing the Content in the powerpoint, Purpose of using visuals and Managing the Response. During her presentation, every team practiced their short “Elevators Pitch” to explain their project to the general public while the audience analyzed and suggested ways to improve this Elevators Pitch of our project. Her presentation was extremely beneficial for the team which was evident by the improvement in presentation of the short summary description of our project as we moved from one member to the other and received constructive feedback from Anne Marie and also other students of Lethbridge University and University of Alberta. We were also given a “Communication That Works” booklet to help us in the future with Presentation Skills.

Andrew Hessel has been the iGEM Ambassador at MIT and currently he is the Co-Chair of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology at Singular University. He was the last presenter of the day, but just as useful as the other speaker sessions we had. He gave us suggestions on various subjects: Wet lab, marketing and promotion to name a few. He strongly suggested that we approach Oil Sands Companies for sponsorship.