Team:NYU Abu Dhabi/Virtual Conference

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Virtual Conference

We reached out to various iGEM teams around the world with the invitation to join us for a virtual conference where we all exchange ideas and gain feedback to better our respective projects as well as our human practices.

A proposal was sent to all the various teams we had interacted with throughout our project

The conference began with 15 minutes of opening remarks, and introductions of all the various team members. After that, each team was given 5 minutes to present the main aspects of their project.This was done by sharing a powerpoint presentation that each team was asked to prepare prior to the conference. The screen-sharing feature was used to share the presentation with the conference participants. Each presentation was followed by 10 minutes of questions, feedback and advice from other teams to the presenting team.

Six teams, including our team ended up participating in the conference on September 15th, which took place over a google hangouts call for approximately 2 hours. The main challenge we encountered when planning and organizing the event, was arranging a time that was reasonable for all the teams participating taken into account the time difference especially as we were joined with teams from Turkey, Australia, China and India.

The points that the teams have discussed including but are not limited to the following:

1) Tell us more about your project and why you chose the idea. Are you participating in any special track?

2) What kind of experiments will you be doing?

3) What are some challenges that you are currently facing or you anticipate to face?

4) How will you incorporate integrated human practices into your project? Are you looking for contacts with experts in the field?

If your institution has participated in iGEM before, what are some winning project tips that you can give to the other teams?

Great appreciation to Team HKUST from Hong Kong, REC Chennai, VIT Vellore from India, Saint Joseph Istanbul from Turkey, iGEM Macquarie from Australia for the fruitful conversation. We look forward to meeting you in person in Boston!