Team:IIT-Madras/Public Engagement
The Language Project
During our interactions with the public on Synthetic Biology, we realized that a large number of people were unaware of recent developments in this field. Synthetic Biology can invite several ethical questions and therefore public engagement is important. India is a diverse country with 22 official languages and only 12.18% speaking English (2001 census). However, scientific research is predominantly communicated in English. In order to enhance public involvement, we designed a video series that serves as a primer in Synthetic Biology in 9 major Indian languages.
The languages covered so far are Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and English. The script for each of the videos is written with the aim of making people of all age groups understand. Find out more here
Research Magazine
The students of iGEM-IIT Madras realized the rising popularity of popular science and decided to venture into this by writing about new and upcoming areas of scientific research. This inspired many of our non-iGEM peers as well and with a sufficient number of articles, we launched a research magazine called ‘Synkranti’ for the students of the Department of Biotechnology of our university. The name derives from Synthetic Biology and Kranti which is a Sanskrit word that means revolution. The first edition of the magazine being initiated by iGEM is a special issue with focus on “synthetic biology”.
Workshop & Lecture Series
Biotechnology is the broad discipline where one creates new technology and applications on existing biological processes and systems in order to make something useful. The department of Biotechnology at the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras has been striving at spreading its research in the various sub fields of Biotechnology since 2004 like Bioprocess Engineering, Medical Biotechnology, Computational Biology, Protein Bioinformatics, Cancer Biology and Plant Biotechnology. Team iGEM-IIT Madras forms one of the primary undergraduate research organs of the department.
Being aspiring biotechnologists, we decided to educate our fellow undergraduates in various sub fields of Biotechnology from other universities in Tamil Nadu with the help of professors that have expertise in these various fields. A two day workshop and lecture series was planned that tried to incorporate as many diverse fields as possible like plant biotechnology, enzyme biology, bio process engineering, medical biotechnology, systems biology, protein bioinformatics and computational neuroscience. The contents were split into the 2 days of the workshop based on the broad criterion of being computationally intensive or not. here