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Meetups

Besides organizing our own meetup at the embassy in Boston, we attended several other meetups!

European Meetup

The iGEM teams of Munich (LMU & TU Munich) took the initiative to organize the European meetup of 2018. The meet-up was held from the 20th – 22nd of July at LMU Biozentrum, located on the edge of Munich. The event was split in four parts; the symposium, poster presentations, workshops and night events. With around 200 participants, a lot of posters and various lectures with different topics there was put a lot of effort in to running the congress so smoothly. The congress was an excellent opportunity to get a feeling about the different projects of the teams, the state the projects were in and to build bridges with teams for potential collaborations.

The iGEM teams of Munich (LMU & TU Munich) took the initiative to organize the European meetup of 2018. The meet-up was held from the 20th – 22nd of July at LMU Biozentrum, located on the edge of Munich. The event was split in four parts; the symposium, poster presentations, workshops and night events. With around 200 participants, a lot of posters and various lectures with different topics there was put a lot of effort in to running the congress so smoothly. The congress was an excellent opportunity to get a feeling about the different projects of the teams, the state the projects were in and to build bridges with teams for potential collaborations.

Our adventure started Friday afternoon the 20th of July, a bit later than that of other teams, due to other obligations. After a road trip of 10 hours, we arrived at our destination in Munich in the middle of the night. The next morning, the congress started at 9:00 with a great breakfast and subsequently at 10:00 the symposium started with excellent speakers presenting about various topics within synthetic biology.

After a coffee break, the poster presentation session started. We even had the opportunity to present our poster among others to Randy Rettberg (president of the iGEM foundation) and to Thea Chrysostomou (iGEM ambassador). Furthermore, a lot of cool pitches and great posters varying from personalized identification/treatment of cancer till an E. coli based mosquito trap were presented. Valuable discussions with groups that had similar themes were held. During the meet-up collaborations were initiated with the Bordeaux and Toulouse iGEM team.

The Bordeaux team could use our Chemistry knowledge to guide them with their project. In return they could help us with the ethics part of the project through showing new insights. The Toulouse team promised to send some of their own bacterial synthesized cellulose for us to use.

In the afternoon workshops were scheduled from companies and iGEM teams regarding synthetic biology, entrepreneurship, teambuilding etc. The day was secluded with an arranged barbecue in a restaurant with some drinks.

On Sunday morning two other scientific talks were given, the award for the best poster was given to ETH Zürich and to end up the congress a wrap-up movie was shown of the time at the congress. After the movie it was time to pick up our stuff, say goodbye to our new friends and wish everybody all the best with their projects.

We decided to stay another day in Munich to play tourist and see the beautiful parts of the city. Fortunately a couple of the other teams decided to do this as well. After some sight-seeing, we scheduled a dinner all together at the typical German restaurant “Hofbrauhaus Munich”. This turned out to be an excellent completion of the weekend. We had life music, German food, beers and lots of fun.