Human Practices

• Educative
• Corporative
• Social

Corporative axis

In this section we aim to know the expert's opinion about our projects in order to get advices and suggestions about how improve the design of Nicko and Chimi. Here we interviewed to professionals in the area of biorremediation and veterinary and told them our projects and they told us their opinions and comments.

Corporative axis

The Activities

Interviewing experts

Nicko's aplicability

In order to know how feasible is a system for nickel removal based in a magnetotactic bacteria, it means Nicko, we were talknig with an expert in water bioremediation. The selected expert was Johana Husserl, she is Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Georgia Institute of Techonoly and Ms.C. from Tulane University. At the present time she works as professor at Universidad de los Andes, giving courses of Environmental Engineering like Environmental Chemistry among others. She has worked in water treatment and explosive removal from soil with bacteria. You can find the audio of the interview (with english subtitles) below:


In brief words, she belives that a nickel removal system would be a very useful tool to solve problems of contaminated water that are common in our country. And the idea of a bacteriaum capable to accumulate a metal is very interesting, even without a special extraction system like the magnetism, which is a plus in our project.

Chimi's aplicability

As a part of our project, it was important for us to talk to experts in animal health to see if our product could be used in the field of veterinary clinics and to know a little more about the stress in animal health and the current methods used to sense glucocorticoids in animals. The next is an interview with the vet Leonel Cardona at La Salle University.

One more time, we got great opinions from experts, he though our project would have a big utility in his job and we taked in account his recomendations and experiences as a part of the development of our project.

Listening our partners

In addition of the important experts' opinion, we wanted to listen our partners as well. The Student Council of the Department of Biological Science at Universidad de los Andes organizes the called "Seminarios de lo Oculto" which are conferences developed by students about different topics related with science. We taked advatage of this space to talk with undergraduate students of Biology, Microbiology and related programs about Nicko and Chimi.

In the same way of all described before, we carried out a great feedback from this exprience. We listened the questions that our partners did and we taked in account their comments to improve our projects with their opinions, which are not other thing than opinions of future professionals.

In addition, our conference was also an opportunity to give out our ideas in our Faculty and promote debate around them.

Here, some pictures of our speakers :)

Poster of our conference

Talking about Nicko & Chimi

Debate with students

More activities on the other two axes:

Social! Educative!