Team:Manchester/conferencetest

MadLab panel discussion - 7th February 2013
The first conference that the team attended was organised by the Manchester Digital Lab (MadLab). MadLab is a community project that organises events in many different disciplines, but the team was most interested in the DIY Bio event that we stumbled across. A panel discussion was held called ‘Local Bioeconomies’, themed around what synthetic biology can do, and public literacy of this subject. The panelists included; Asa Calow, DIY Biologist and Founder and Director of the MadLab in Manchester; John O'Shea, artist and creator of the world's first bio-engineered football; Philipp Boeing, UCL iGEM ‘11/‘12 and London Biohackers; and Rod Dillon, lecturer in biomedicine, School of Health and Medicine, Lancaster University.
After the panel discussion, the team mingled with the speakers and the other guests and got some useful feedback for our early project ideas, and also some valuable advice about how to successfully plan and execute an iGEM project in general. It was a really interesting event that properly kicked off our thinking into human practices. You can watch a video all about it below!

Future Perspectives in Synthetic Biology - 8th February 2013
The following day, 8th February, the team attended a conference hosted by the University of Manchester, titled “Future Perspectives in Synthetic Biology”. The guests and speakers in attendance were a mix of academics from within the university interested in biotechnology, and industry representatives from such companies as GlaxoSmithKline and Synthace. We already had some project ideas in mind at this point, but the various talks by faculty staff and guest speakers proved very useful for narrowing down our search. We gave a very brief presentation to the guests, introducing the iGEM competition and what it entails.
Coffee and lunch breaks were used as networking opportunities! We presented a poster with more indepth details of iGEM and encouraged the attendees, in particular the industry representatives, to speak with us.
Overall, we feel that attending this conference really bolstered our knowledge about synthetic biology in general, and what applications it is currently being used for. The talks were very interesting and some even inspired new project ideas!

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