Team:IIT-Madras/Silver
Silver Human Practices
Education and Engagement
- Language project: a multilingual science communication initiative:
An introductory course in Synthetic Biology in the form of a 5 part lecture series in 8 Indian languages and several international languages in the hope of communicating synthetic biology in a easy to understand language. Read more..
- Visits to school:
With the motivation of inspiring young minds of our country to pursue careers in Biotechnology, we conducted over 4 sessions in various schools that included explaining basic concepts of synthetic biology through fun games and interactive sessions. Read more..
- Biotech Research Club sessions in Javascript:
In the public engagement and education efforts for our project in 2017, we managed to initiate a dedicated club for inculcating an interest in Biotechnology among the freshmen of our university. As we continued our efforts, we held a introductory session in JavaScript which is a useful tool to make webpages. We ended this session with a fun activity of remaking the “Thanos spares you” webpage.
- Two day workshop to spread the knowledge of different spheres of biotechnology and iGEM:
Being aspiring biotechnologists, we decided to educate our fellow undergraduates in various sub fields of Biotechnology from other universities in Tamil Nadu with the help of professors that have expertise in these various fields. We conducted a 2 day educational workshop and lecture series for students across universities. Read more..
- SynBio journal club:
The goal of the SynBio journal club is to promote discussion about research, specifically about synthetic biology and to foster an interest in research in the undergraduates. Read more..
- Launching a research magazine-Synkranti and publishing articles on the Medium blog:
To venture into the world of popular science writing, we decided to add articles written by our members and launched a magazine called Synkranti dedicated for Biotechnology. We also published the articles onto our medium blog page to spread the knowledge of synthetic biology to the general public. Read more..
- Conversations about various aspects of Synthetic Biology in different languages with common public:
India is a land of many different languages and rich diversity. Often scientific decisions pertaining to GMO and other important topics do not reach those that speak languages apart from English. Motivated by our efforts of the Language project, we began talking about Synthetic biology to various people and showing them our videos in their native languages. Read more..
- Writing about the importance of iGEM and science communication in Synthetic Biology in media:
Our efforts in the language project and subsequent publicity through social media caught the attention of media houses and journals like the Indian chapter of IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers), Times of India and India Bioscience.
- IEEE India council newsletter (ICNL) (http://sites.ieee.org/indiacouncil/)
- Times of India education supplement (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education)
- India Bioscience article (https://indiabioscience.org/)
- Know your Scientific Discovery series:
We started a series where we educated our viewers on social media like instagram and twitter about significant scientific discoveries that happened in the last century.
- IIT Madras Alumni Association Sangam:
We got the opportunity to network with the alumni and share our project and initiatives with them, almost 1000 Alumni visited the event and we received tremendous feedback. Through these interactions, we realized that a huge number of people have misconceptions about genetic modifications and that we should work harder at spreading information about topics which involves a lot of public attention yet has been conveyed in a partial light. We interacted with H.R. Mohan, a senior member of IEEE . He was impressed by our projects and invited us to write about iGEM and science communication in the coming IEEE newsletter.
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Developing software for Synthetic Biology
- ChassiDex: a database for synthetic hosts
Continuing our project from 2017, we worked on improving the credibility and searchability of the data on our database. Further, we collaborated with Team Marburg to add data for their host organism; V. natrigens onto our database. We added data from our own experiments onto the A. baylyi entry. Read more..
- ComicSyns: icon font for drawing synBio circuits with ease
ComicSyns is an iconic icon font that lets you draw SynBio circuit symbols by simply typing in characters on your keyboard and drawing genetic circuits with ease. The symbols are adapted from SBOL Visual. Read more..
Collaborations
- Collaborations with other iGEM teams around the world to make Language project videos in 11 non-Indian languages
We collaborated with over 13 teams that includes a large number of international teams to make videos in 11 international (relative to India) and 8 indian languages. Further we collaborated with a large number of people not related to iGEM that helped us with the voices in videos for Indian languages.
- Collaboration with Cambrionics to show Language project videos to school children
Cambrionics, an educational startup based on educating middle school children on basics on synthetic biology through microscopy and simple activities. During their visit to our lab, they were impressed by our initiatives with the Language Project and showed the videos to the children that attended the session.
> - Collaborations for interlab
We helped REC-Chennai by giving them DH5-alpha cells for their interlab experiments that helped with their interlab study.
- Beach Clean-up
A few members from our team joined up with VIT-Vellore and REC-Chennai to participate in a beach clean-up organized by VIT-Vellore, where we removed plastics from the beach and helped spread awareness on how much it affected the environment.
> - All-India iGEM meet
We sent a team of three to represent IIT Madras at the all-India iGEM meet where they presented our project and a poster, which we received anonymous feedback from, simulating the actual jamboree. The team also interacted with the other Indian teams and set up a base for further collaborations.
