Meet up
During this year, we participated to two Meetups: the Parisian Meetup and the Munich Meetup. These meetup were the first times we presented our project to all the iGEM teams. The feedback we received helped us to improve our project, as well as our presentation and our poster.
Parisian Meetup
The Pasteur iGEM team hosted the Parisian iGEM Meetup in Paris (France) Saturday the 7th of July. In the morning, each iGEM team presented their project in front of a jury composed of scientist and professionals. Then, at the end of the afternoon, we had open discussions on bioethics and round tables on synthetic biology.
The Jury (Pascale Dupuis-Williams, Jonathan Keller and Deshmukh Gopaul) gave us feedbacks about our project and presentation. This meetup allowed us to train before the final presentation at Boston.
Munich Meetup
The Munich iGEM team hosted the European iGEM Meetup in Munich (Germany) from
Friday the 20th to Sunday the 22nd of July. At this event, many iGEM teams from all Europe met together to exchange about their projects and listen to talks from experts in the field of synthetic biology. In total, 180 young scientists were participating.
In this Meetup, we had the chance to discuss with Will Wright, a Business Accelerator, Investment Manager and European iGEM Ambassador. We also had a chance to talk to Randy Rettberg, President and Founder of the iGEM Foundation. We presented
our project to him and discuss the different aspects of the competiton. He shown a great interest in our project and the issues it might solve.
On Saturday, leading international scientists in Synthetic Biology gave talks about the newest trends in the dicipline; Michael Hecht (Princeton University) and Kathrin Lang (Technische Universität München). In the afternoon, we had a poster session, where all iGEM teams presented their project and we had an opportunity to share our ideas with other teams. We almost managed to discuss to all European teams and talked to the American iGEM team from University of Delaware. Also, in the afternoon we participated to the workshop “in and outside of Synthetic Biology and Science” giving us clues about team building and fundraising.
In summary, general opinions of people about our project were enthousiastic as we could thoroughly discuss about our idea and its potential fallout. But still, there's a lot of issues were left to be resolved such as the photobioreactor and the environmental concerns about our project. The graphic design of our poster had success. Although some modifications and corrections would be important to improve the poster, for it to be finally ready for the final event, the Giant Jamboree!
