Presentations to High School students and Undergraduates

Friday, June 28th

A presentation about iGEM, Synthetic Biology, and Antibiotic Resistance was given at the University of Pittsburgh to 30 students in several summer programs: Systems Medicine REU (SysMed) program in the Chemical Engineering Department; Training and Experimentation in Computational Biology (TECBio) program for undergraduate students in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology; Drug Discovery, Systems and Computational Biology (DiSCoBio) program for high school students in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology, and part of the UPCI Summer Academy Program.

Friday, July 19th

High school students participating in the CMU Summer Academy for Mathematics + Science (SAMS) summer programs came to visit the lab to hear about the iGEM project as part of a lab “scavenger hunt”. The team gave short 5 minute presentations to 8 small groups of about two students each, explaining the biological advantages that bacteriophage and our system in particular have over antibiotics.

Friday, September 20th

The team talked informally with a prospective Carnegie Mellon undergraduate and his parents interested in iGEM.

Monday, September 23rd

A presentation about iGEM and Antibiotic was presented to juniors and seniors at Pittsburgh SciTech in the Life Sciences and Environmental Sciences concentrations. This Pittsburgh Public School teaches a science and technology magnet program and they have funding to support an iGEM High School team in 2014.

Tuesday, September 24th

The iGEM and Antibiotic talk was presented to a class of Research Science seniors at Pittsburgh Allderdice High School. Allderdice is a traditional high school and offers every AP Science course offered by College Board.

Other Outreach Activities

July 9-10th

The team participated in the development of new BioBrick part pages. The goal is to make part pages more uniform and parts better characterized. We videoconferenced with Purdue and several other teams to give feedback on the drafted data sheets and discuss other suggestions pertaining to the part pages and required data collection.