Team:Queens Canada/Outreach

This year QGEM collaborated with Shad Valley Queen’s to create a workshop in the field of synthetic biology for high school students. Our goal for this outreach initiative was to expose secondary school students to the emerging field of synthetic biology and spark an interest in this new technology. We tried to emulate the iGEM experience and with these ideas in mind planned a two day crash course. To read more about our Shad Valley workshop click here.

The Queen's Innovation Connector (QIC) is a joint program by the Faculty of Applied Science and School of Business. They aim to encourage, support, and create a platform for aspiring students, professors, and Canadian companies to collaborate through workshops, internship opportunities and programs. This summer they ran a summer program called the Queen's Summer Innovation Initiative (QSII), where Queen's students spend the summer learning about entrepreneurship, corporate innovation and change management from faculty, alumni, entrepreneurs and business experts. The students formed small groups and over the course of four months, started their own businesses or worked in collaboration with a company, culminating in a 10,000 dollar grand prize to the most successful group.

Our goal in working with QIC was to build ties with innovative commerce and engineering students. This allows people who normally are not exposed to the field of synthetic biology to learn about the potential of this new technology. In the spirit of collaboration, QGEM gave a thirty minute talk to the members of QSII, explaining the fundamentals of synthetic biology and our project this year. We hope to make QGEM more interdisciplinary in the future to provide our team with a stronger financial base and to inspire QSII members to work in synthetic biology.

The Queen's Synthetic Biology Organization (QSynBio) is a club that aims to foster growth and expansion of the synthetic biology community at Queen's University. Its purpose is to act as an open forum to learn about the field and to develop the necessary molecular biology knowledge and techniques. This year, we are changing the structure of QSynBio so that it ties in more closely with QGEM. This allows for more prepared members and ultimately more time and resources to spend on the project itself. We are excited about the new direction that this collaboration will take us and hope to build a home for synthetic biology at Queen's in the upcoming year.

We have also reached out to different sources concerning our project and spread awareness of what we have been up to. In addition to appearing in the Kingston Whig and the Queen's Journal, we were also contacted by Ontario Morning, a CBC radio show who interviewed our project manager, Henry Barron. Click below to have a look at them!

Click here to read the Kingston Whig article!

Click here to read the Queen's Journal article!