Education & Public Engagement

The importance of informing and becoming informed has from the beginning of the project been a priority. We have from the early stages of working on our project been focused on informing and sharing our knowledge with society and raising a public awareness of our project topic. Our impression of the public understanding concerning the important role of chaperones and protein folding in general is that it seems to be lacking. This was something we wanted to change. By, to a large extent, focusing on education and to engage the public in events we tried to spread the valuable knowledge that we have gained throughout the project. Through our collaborations and our integrated human practice we were also given experiences from other iGEM-teams, the public society and different stakeholders. Read more about our Integrated Human Practice here:

Engineers Without Borders Sweden

By implementing engineering expertise, Engineers Without Borders Sweden is actively trying to solve engineering challenges related to inequality and global challenges. Engineers without borders Sweden is an organization and an advisory committee at Linköping university. During the spring, Engineers Without Borders Sweden had a campus tour for secondary school students and the project team of LiU iGEM 2018 was a halt at this tour. We gave a short lecture about our iGEM project and an introduction to the iGEM-competition.

Summer University - Sommaruniversitet

During three days we supervised laboratory work where groups of secondary school students extracted DNA from a kiwi fruit. Summer University is an annual event organized by Linköping university where secondary school students get the chance of coming to the university and try scientific experiments and learn about the mechanisms connected to the experiments. We helped plan the experiment we supervised and by doing so we organized it so that it could be connected to our iGEM-project and synthetic biology in general. We taught them about protein folding and the importance of these being folded correctly. By being a part of this event, we got a chance of inspiring these youths to hopefully consider the field of synthetic biology in the future.

Kalasmottagningen

Kalasmottagningen is an organisation convention for new students at Linköping University. It is a welcoming event organized by Linköping University to welcome all ny attendants to the university and to the student life in Linköping. Here all new students have the opportunity to become introduced to different student and non-student organisations. We in LiU iGEM had a stand on the convention and got the opportunity to introduce all interested to LiU iGEM, iGEM and our project.