William & Mary is celebrating 100 years of women and co-education on campus. This meant our team had the unique opportunity to connect with alumni from a diverse array of fields to share our research. We wanted to excite an older generation of women who did not have a background in bioengineering, and encourage them to stay connected with campus and our synthetic biology research.

Knowing our alumni come from a diverse array of majors we moved forward with the assumption that all attendees had at least a highschool/intro level understanding of biology. For women without a background in biology we wanted to generate excitement for our project by describing potential applications of our work. We knew some of the alumni visiting would have backgrounds in biology due to bachelors or master degrees in biology, and we decided to speak with them more deeply about the nuances of our project. However, as SynBio is such a recent field, even those with biology background night not have not encountered some of the bioengineering concepts we used. We decided to treat each conversation as a unique learning experience and adapt our poster presentation based on the interests and background of each alumni.

Because SynBio was new to many of these women, we needed to focus on introducing the field to them rather than explaining the details of our project in depth. Our goal wasn’t to teach them the science of 3G assembly as much as introduce the concept of inserting DNA into a bacterium genome. We needed to emphasize the wide range of applications of SynBio, and get the women interested in the field, and then dive deeper into the science as alumni expressed interest.

This kind of connection is very specific to the individual because every alumni would have different interests,

On September 21st, William and Mary hosted a poster presentation as part of the school’s “Women Weekend.” Our team presented our iGEM project, and had the honor of talking extensively approximately 20 of the over 100 attendees. All 100 attendees were able to review our poster during the walking dinner provided. As the attendees stopped by our poster, we would explain our project in the detail that best fit the attendee. Many of the women did not have an extensive biology background, and thus we focused heavily on applications of both our project and the field of SynBio. On the other hand, one woman we talked to had a PhD in biology, and was able to ask perceptive and astute questions regarding our project. She was amazed by how far techniques in biology have progressed.

The event was a fantastic experience for the team and the alumni alike. Many of the women were blown away by what our lab was able to accomplish, and several of them expressed how proud they were of their alma mater. While the women we talked to were very enthusiastic about our project, many of them were not particularly interested in the details of the science. Rather than confuse them with unnecessary information, we boiled our project into a few short, easily understandable sentences, and spent most of the time on applications of the project in various fields including medicine and conservation biology.