This year the devoted and strongly motivated Aix-Marseille team organized the second Mediterranean meet up in Marseille on the 9th and 10th of August. This second edition was a great opportunity to meet more teams and countries each other and to share about our projects. It was a meetup including poster presentations, to which we invited teams from all the Mediterranean countries. It gave us all an opportunity to make a rehearsal presenting before the Giant Jamboree.

This year, 7 teams from Spain and France participated in the meetup: UPF_CRG_Barcelona, Madrid-OLM, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Pasteur_Paris, Paris_Bettencourt, and Montpellier. To kick-off the meeting and present their projects and engage the audience, each team gave a 180-second synthesis of their project. This was an initiative taken from Swissnex Brazil and Nano-Tera.

We had a superb judging panel, to evaluate the presentations and give us all feedback on how they perceived our projects, that included: Mr. Laurent VILLARD (Department of medical genetics at the Timone hospital), M. Victoria SCHMIDT (Post-doctoral at the LISM laboratory), M. Leticia HOUOT (our Secondary PI), Mr. Gauthier DANGLA PELISSIER (one of our Instructors), Mr. Marlon SIDORE (one of our Instructors), and M. Thea Chrysostomou the European after-iGEM ambassador

The program this year included snap presentations of the different projects and poster sessions. The snap presentation was a project description in 180 seconds, this gave a very dynamic an punchy training session. It was a chance for iGEMers to make a concise synthesis of their project. The poster sessions allowed a more thorough description of the project with a support and encouraged discussion about the projects in a relaxed atmosphere. After the project presentations, we all went on a visit to discover the city, this tour allowed the different teams to get to know each other better and to create strong social links. The meet-up was an excellent rehearsal for presenting the project and a great opportunity to develop cooperation between teams and help each other to improve the projects.

A big thank you to members of the Bordeaux, Grenoble, Montpellier, Pasteur Paris, Paris Sorbonne, Paris Bettencourt, Barcelona and Madrid teams for coming in Marseille.