Team:AQA Unesp/Engagement

public engagement

events and presentations

UNESP TV interview

Our university, UNESP, has a TV channel called TV UNESP and our team was invited to took part in a feature about diabetes and talk about our project! The feature was aired in the TV UNESP News and in the show “Focus on Health”. You can watch them here:

▲ top

Educational video: what is synthetic biology?

▲ top

Visited Ouro Fino

To interact with companies that works with Bioprocess and Biotechnology, we went to meet a Brazilian company in the area of animal health, called Ourofino, which works with the development of veterinary drugs and other products for animals, including vaccines. We had a wonderful day at the company and an interesting exchange of knowledge. They told us about how the company works, in especial the departament of new drugs development, and we told them about the activities we develop at the university, including the Insubiota.

▲ top

Lecture in the “Week of Industrial Biotechnology”

We were invited by the Usp-EEL-Brazil Igem’s team of 2016 to hold a lecture in the academic event “Week of Industrial Biotechnology” at the University of São Paulo, Lorena Campus. Our team brought a new view of probiotics and genetically modified organisms in the treatment of diseases, showing that is possible to use engineered cells with health increase purposes. In this experience, we could present our Insubiota project for almost 100 people and exchange interesting knowledge with biochemistry engineering students.

▲ top

BiotecShow

BiotecShow is an event hosted by the UNESP Araraquara National League of Biotechnology Academics(LiNA Araraquara) that aims to show people how biotechnology is integrated in our daily lives by doing several experiment and expositions. Our team took part in the 2016 BiotecShow, where we could present a poster about our project and synthetic biology.

▲ top

Health Fair

We also took part in a health fair hosted by the Student Permanent Pharmaceutical Assistance Program of our faculty in our city. In the fair, there was a diabetes stand where people could check their blood glucose level and receive orientation about. Our team presented again a poster about the project to spread it and help the awareness of diabetes. Besides that, we gave them yoghurt made by us and, in exchange, we ask them to donate whatever amount of money to help us raising fund to our project.

▲ top

Summer Course in MATLAB

When we start to define our project and check what we were going to develop, we noticed that the mathematical modeling and the MATLAB software work would be a challenge for us. To overcome this obstacle, our team arranged a summer (or winter if you’re in the North hemisphere) course in MATLAB open to everyone who wanted to learn about it. In this course, it was introduced basic concepts on mathematical modeling and how to use MATLAB. The course was taught by an expert professor and had a duration of 5 days, 4 hours/day. To help in our fundraising, we charged a fee of R$ 50 (~ US$ 15) from all participants, 26 in total.

▲ top

Talk “Programming life: Synthetic biology and iGEM”

To promote synthetic biology, our team hosted a talk named “Programming life: synthetic biology and iGEM”. In this talk, we talked about what is synthetic biology and how it can be used to improve our lives and our world. Besides that, we also talked about our project and the iGEM Competition. The audience of this talk was about 50 people.

▲ top

Talk with college preparatory course students

We were invited by the college preparatory course “CUCA” to do a presentation about our major and biotechnology to the students. During the lecture we talked about the iGEM competition and our project, the students were very interested in the topics we presented and we could raise awareness about diabetes and interest in biotechnology among youngs.

▲ top

Lecture to elderly people

We were invited by the PET program to do a presentation about biotechnology to elderly people. In this lecture we talked about what is biotechnology, its applications in our daily lives and briefly about genetic engineering to about 100 people.

▲ top

Poster presentation in the Pharmaceutical Congress and Week of Bioprocess and Biotechnology Engineering from Unesp

We presented our project and ideas in the Congress of Pharmaceutical Sciences and in the Week of Bioprocess and Biotechnology Engineering from Unesp where we could be in touch with students from the institution and another universities from all over the country. Our team also interacted with the viewers of our poster playing a game with them in which they controlled a OGM bacteria capturing nanoparticles inside of a human’s body. The winner of the game received a prize to celebrate his good interaction with the biology synthetic word!

▲ top

fundraising

Crowdfunding campaign

Fundraising to participate in iGEM has been a major obstacle for Brazilian teams since our country is currently going through a delicate moment in policy and economics. Living with the uncertainty of getting money from the University or from sponsors, also because it’s our first time in iGEM, our team launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money that we needed to pay the inscription fee.
Our campaign was done using the platform Catarse (www.catarse.me) over 50 days, our goal was to raise R$ 18.550 (~ US$ 5840) and it was all-or-nothing, what means that we should reach the goal by the end of the 50 days, otherwise we would lose it all!
Spreading our campaign, we made a video about our project, did some interviews to journals, local radio stations and share it in social networks.

▲ top

Candy sale

We carry out candy sales at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, UNESP campus, to raise funds for our trip to Boston. More than that, raising awareness of the importance of developing new technologies involving synthetic biology, the development of national research and the internationalization of our work has been essential to everything we have done until now.