Team:NYMU-Taipei/HP/10th anniversary exhibition

This year we are hosting the iGEM NYMU-Taipei 10 Year Exhibition where we would like to present projects of NYMU-Taipei from the past decade. Other teams would be able to see the brainstorming process, the problems past members faced and a step by step process of how they solved any issues. We would also like to analyze how topics and thinking process evolved over these past ten years. We look forward that through this 10-year exhibition we can share the biology and biological innovation applications to the general public, current iGEM participants or even future iGEM participants.
In this exhibition, we will present NYMU-Taipei team stories and experiences we had in the past ten years as well as arrange short talks with past-iGEM participants for advice. In the below time-lapse photography and panorama, you can see how we arranged the venue, as well as the whole picture of the exhibition.

Interview with Senior iGEMers

During the arrangement of iGEM NYMU-Taipei 10 Year Exhibition, we had interviewed with twelve senior NYMU-Taipei iGEMers, who attended iGEM from 2007-2016. Through these interviews, we observed and learned how synthetic biology had impacted the past members of NYMU-Taipei team, and how “designed thinking” affected each person’s scientific career. In addition, these seniors gave us lots of suggestions to adjust and improve our project. The feedback significantly meant iGEM experience from all NYMU-Taipei iGEMers could be passed down, however, the long-standing ten-year team history.
You can read here in our excerpts of five of the essence of the interviews, other interviews can refer to our team Facebook page. Furthermore, we re-made two posters, providing a visual overview of all topics of projects from the past ten years in iGEM NYMU-Taipei, and they could be viewed online as a high-resolution PDF.

Opening Ceremony

September 4th was an important date of iGEM NYMU-Taipei 10 Year Exhibition, the opening ceremony. We invited the president of National Yang-Ming University, Prof. Kung-Yee Liang, the primary PI of Team NCTU_Formosa, Wen-Liang Chen, and the members of The Investigator Taiwan, to address speeches for the exhibition. We welcomed everyone to come to the open ceremony and celebrated with us, understanding projects from the past NYMU-Taipei teams.
The news related to opening ceremony and the following exhibition was published on our school official website. We were very grateful to National Yang-Ming University for financial support and all kinds of assistance.

Public Engagement

Scientific American provided us with a lot of publications on synthetic biology and genetic engineering, so that we could introduce how synthetic biology works and what iGEM is, to the public and students in National Yang-Ming University. Prof. Chuan-Hsiung Chang also explained synthetic biology and iGEM to visitors on exhibition. We not only outreached genetic engineering, synthetic biology and iGEM, but recruited students in our campus to attend next year’s iGEM competition.

Forum: “From Past to the Future”

In order to make people learn more about iGEMers’ scientific career and how iGEM influenced their choice, a forum, called “iGEM NYMU-Taipei talk: From Past to Future”, was held on the final day of the exhibition. We invited two senior iGEMers, Shang-Jui Tsai, who attended iGEM 2011 and now is a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Jui-Tzu Huang, who attended iGEM 2014, to share their stories and career development after iGEM.
Interestingly, Shang-Jui shared his idea with us via webcast from Baltimore. His Ph.D. project just derived from his iGEM project- “Wireless neuro-stimulator featuring Optogenetics”. It was very cool for us to turn iGEM project into career goal and objective. We expected the two inspirational talks to promote public awareness of iGEM, and unlimited possibilities after iGEM competition.

After iGEM NYMU-Taipei 10-Year Exhibition

During the exhibition, we had a wonderful chance to communicate with other iGEM teams, students in National Yang-Ming University and the general public. We also understood more deeply about the team history of NYMU-Taipei, improving our project and having us know what our future career may look like. The whole exhibition meant a lot to us and we would like to express our highest thanks to all teams who attended this exhibition, and all people who helped and supported us.
Though iGEM NYMU-Taipei 10 Year Exhibition had ended, just like Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” We hoped that all our effort and the exhibition would make positive change in the world and the iGEM community.

Album

Chang Gung University

National Chung Cheng University

National Chung Hsing

The Affiliated High School of National Chengchi University

Teacher

Taipei Wego Private Senior High School