In addition to expanding our community, our team works on strengthening past partnership and investing in the sustainability of our programs. These initiatives range from our iGEM wide outreach database and partnering with local high schools to new club partnerships and our internship program.

Maintaining positive relationships requires continued communication. One of our major goals this year was to create partnerships which spanned more than just a single event. A key component of this is our partnership with local high schools. High school students are future researchers and iGEM team members; we want to do all we can to inspire a passion for synthetic biology. High school teachers are tasked with teaching a diverse array of subjects, and we need to make synthetic biology an exciting part of their curriculum to teach so that their students are eager to learn. In order to support teachers in providing positive lab experiences for their students, and in the hopes of inspiring and interest in STEM, we have partnered with John Leone, a high school biology teacher with Williamsburg-James City County Schools. We worked closely with Mr. Leone to create outreach programs which aligned with the lessons being taught in class and ensured the level of sophistication was appropriate given his student’s backgrounds. We integrated synthetic biology lessons into the topics Mr. Leone was already teaching his class and arranged for a series of lab visits.

he lab visits were scheduled based on the lessons being taught in Mr. Leone’s class and they fell outside of the traditional iGEM schedule. The first event was held April 24th and was a collaborative effort between the iGEM 2017 team and this years team. This gave our teams an excellent opportunity to get together while promoting synthetic biology to high school students. 30 students attended the event. At the event, we taught the concepts of a restriction digest with an activity and practiced micropipetting before performing a real restriction digest. Students then completed a gel electrophoresis activity using their own DNA samples from the previous experiment. After lunch students jumped into bacteriophage activities, completing a soil enrichment and a direct plating. Students had brought their own samples and were on the hunt for novel bacteriophage; after the event, it was determined that 15 students successfully found phage! Students ended the day by analyzing their gel. The event was picked up by William & Mary News, check out the video Below.

We are working to expand this event each semester. This fall Mr. Leone is bringing three classes of 30+ students to our lab for a similar event. They will be visiting November 13th,14th and 15th.

Here are the awesome activities we have planned for this year's partnership. A huge thank you to iGEM alumnae Alyssa Luz-Ricca for all of her help in developing these class protocols!

Our team is dedicated to creating lasting relationships with our community partners. To ensure these relationships are sustained and that we are able to provide the community with high quality educational programs and products, we actively seek out additional campus partners. This year our team is increasing our year long programing; we will be continuing the conversation and holding community events from November until April, post iGEM season. To support these initiatives we are working with the William & Mary biology department to create BIOL 444: Mentored Teaching in Synthetic Biology. This is a for credit course for undergraduate students with a background in synthetic biology and an interest in public engagement and outreach.

Students who have assisted with an outreach event during the fall semester are eligible to enroll in the 444 course. These students review protocols and synthetic biology literature to prepare for open lab events which take place throughout the spring semester. Students receive advanced training in synthetic biology techniques and gain experience teaching secondary school students in a laboratory environment. The protocols which are carried out with local high school students were developed by iGEM alumnae Alyssa Luz-Ricca and cover techniques as foundational as pipetting to the more advanced phage assays and restriction digests. This new course simultaneously enhances the undergraduate experience while providing wonderful learning opportunities for high school students who wouldn’t be able to complete this kind of work in their own science classrooms.

Link to Protocols

This year the William and Mary team is proud to say that we have partnered with the newly founded Steminist club to take on even bigger female focused events. This new organization’s mission is to encourage women to join STEM fields. This partnership will help sustain our year round programing event and ensure our team always has more than enough hands for all our events. Their team is 100 women strong and they will be supporting us in our Girl Scout event Ladies in the Lab in November.