Over the summer our lab hosted three high school interns for a month long training program. We formed a sustained relationship with each intern through our extended one on one partnership. By personally mentoring each student, we ensured they had a firm grasp of various SynBio concepts such as cloning and PCRs. As we slowly introduced these concepts we also taught them the associating wet lab techniques until they had a foundational understanding of core Synbio topics. Over the course of the month the high schoolers became proficient at micropipetting, miniprepping, performing colony PCRS, PCR purifications and running gel electrophoresis among other wet-lab techniques. It was amazing to watch the personal growth of the interns.

The interns were also assigned with researching and presenting on a Synbio topic in the field of space travel. This encouraged each of the students to conduct higher level research with University resources and the support of the iGEM team. Davis combined his fascination of colonizing Mars with Synbio and spent time in and out of the lab researching habitat construction on Mars using 3D printing with synthesized bioplastic. Nitin dove into nutrition concerns in long term space travel and presented synthetic cyanobacteria as a food source for space colonies, and Nikhil presented on using synthetic bacteria to convert graphene oxide to graphene for a potential rocket fuel source. Nikhil also came to realize his passion for the math and programming aspect of iGEM, and later emailed the team reflecting on how much he enjoyed his time interning.

See Nitin and Nikhil’s presentations, Davis’s talking points.