One hundred undergraduates, graduate students and PhD students from the life sciences came 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 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 grate experience to discuses our ideas with a scientific community, not only during our presentation but also during the evening event with a barbecue on the sidelines in the Esprit Arena.

The Presentation of our iGEM project by Dustin Dankelman and Marc Schulte and the iGEM team from Bielefeld started the Convention together with three keynote lectures.The three keynote lectures by representatives of famous companies provided the participants with a practical and intuitive representation of the work of the fields and developments in the industry. Dr. Holger Bengs of the BCNP Consultants GmbH gave the interested participants at the beginning an overview of the biotech industry. In the second lecture, Dr. Barbara Maertens , Head of protein expression of the Cube Biotech GmbH, talked about her jump 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 useful our presentation was, we have designed a questionnaire. At this point we would like to thank all the young scientist, who helped use with their feedback, to address this questions as shown below.

Pictures

Analysis of the questionnaires:

72 people have been asked:




Please klick here to see our questionnaire