One hundred undergraduates, graduate students and PhD students from the life sciences gathered on Friday 12 July 2013 in the Esprit Arena in Dusseldorf, to train with professionals from academia and industry in two days for a successful start of their career. The fourth BIO.NRW ( PhD ) Student Convention offered an exiting combination of lectures and workshops regarding non-scientific knowledge and soft skills to complement the expertise of the young researchers.

We decided to use the opportunity to evaluate the level of knowledge about synthetic biology and iGEM in a scientific community. Further, we used our chance to give a presentation and inform the young scientists about synthetic biology, iGEM and our project. In this environment it was a great experience to discuss our ideas with a scientific community, not only during our presentation but also during the evening event, a barbecue in the Esprit Arena.

The Presentation of our iGEM project by Dustin Dankelman and Marc Schulte from Bonn and the iGEM team from Bielefeld started the Convention along with three keynote lectures.These three keynote lectures by representatives of well-known companies provided the participants with a practical and intuitive representation of the work of the scientific fields and developments in the industry. At the beginning, Dr. Holger Bengs of the BCNP Consultants GmbH gave the interested participants an overview of the biotech industry. In the second lecture, Dr. Barbara Maertens, managing director of the Cube Biotech GmbH, talked about her move from a global biotech company to a start-up. The third keynote lecture with the topic "Research and development in the global pharmaceutical industry" was held by Dr. Thomas Lauterbach, Head of Clinical Operations Europe at the biopharmaceutical company UCB. The second day was dedicated to a customized workshop program.

To evaluate how many scientist know about iGEM, how they think about synthetic biology in general and how useful our presentation was for them, we designed a questionnaire. At this point we would like to thank all the young scientists, who helped us with their feedback to address the questions shown below.

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Analysis of the questionnaires:

72 people have been asked:




Please klick here to see our questionnaire