Team:EPFL/Public Engagement
Education & Public Engagement
Reaching out with the public and the scientific community was important to us. Here is our journey
The iGEM European Meetup was our first opportunity to interact with the iGEM Community and other iGEMers and we could not be more excited to be there. It did not take long for us to start meeting teams, almost minutes from when we arrived, we put up our poster and the poster sessions began even before the event was scheduled to start. We were so excited to be in a space where everyone was so thrilled about their project and it was a great energy to start the conference off.
We attended many of different workshops that were organised by the various iGEM teams and organisations. Many of them we found insurmountable useful and it was a great chance to view different perspectives of the teams persenting, for example the “Online Public Engagement in Written Format” given by iGEM Copenhagen introduced us to the use of ‘Medium’ as a social platform and we entered a very fruitful discussion about the different social platforms we can use and the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. The workshop “Windows: The Neglected Child in Bioinformatics” was particularly useful for us as well, given that an important part of our project was Bioinformatics based. We were able to learn and discuss the guidelines of implementing bioinformatic software that helped us verify what we were doing, we elaborate on this in our Integrated Human Practices page.
We attended many of different workshops that were organised by the various iGEM teams and organisations. Many of them we found insurmountable useful and it was a great chance to view different perspectives of the teams persenting, for example the “Online Public Engagement in Written Format” given by iGEM Copenhagen introduced us to the use of ‘Medium’ as a social platform and we entered a very fruitful discussion about the different social platforms we can use and the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. The workshop “Windows: The Neglected Child in Bioinformatics” was particularly useful for us as well, given that an important part of our project was Bioinformatics based. We were able to learn and discuss the guidelines of implementing bioinformatic software that helped us verify what we were doing, we elaborate on this in our Integrated Human Practices page.
It was a great experience overall, we learned a lot from the professors speaking who inspired us with their work, had fruitful discussions with other iGEM teams about each others projects and poster, learnt a lot about how we could improve our project and meet some very interesting people. A big thank you to iGEM LMU & TU Munich for organising the event! (The pretzels were amazing, with the yogourt sauce!)