Team:Uppsala/Collaborations

COLLABORATIONS

Collaborations and Outreach

In iGEM Uppsala we believe that collaboration and outreach is an important part of our project. Helping out other iGEM teams, but also asking for help when we need it, is as important as anything else in a successful project. This year was no different. We collaborated with teams all around the world in our webinars and in a postcard challenge. Additionally, we also had collaborations a bit closer to home. Such as in June we took part in the Nordic iGEM Conference (NIC) in Copenhagen. We also collaborated with other Swedish teams during our iGEM run. The biggest collaboration there was the organization of a panel discussion with the Stockholm team. We also helped iGEM Lund with their newly established team that is having their first run in 2017. Of course there is no way we could have done iGEM without receiving some help! Here we would like to thank all the teams from Sweden, Denmark and Finland for giving us constant insight and answering the burning questions we had. Also, a special thank you to iGEM Stockholm for helping us with clarifications around the InterLab study.

Now, let’s take a more detailed look into the collaboration we had this year!

Webinars

This year our team wanted to discover a bit more about the ethical part of our project and science in general. After some discussion with the ethics experts at our university we felt a need to talk with other iGEM team. Therefore, we decided to host three webinars with topics relating to ethics in science.
These webinars were based on our chapters in the ethics guidelines and the answers given by the teams were taken into consideration for designing our guidelines. The three webinars topics were Social Responsibility, Genetic Engineering and Property Rights. Five teams from all around the globe participated in each webinar and discussed three questions about the topic, shared their opinions and experiences. The sessions were live streamed on YouTube and the recording can be found at iGEM Uppsala´s YouTube channel.

Panel Discussion

As a continuation of the webinars, our team decided to include the public opinion on how they feel about different ethical issues and questions surrounding biology. We wanted to organize a discussion that could engage not only students of biology and members of iGEM teams but also researchers and the general public. This would not be an easy task for a professional, let alone us, who never organized an event before. Fortunately, iGEM Stockholm was willing to share the responsibilities so we managed to organize a lively and interesting discussion in Stockholm - with three speakers who are the experts in the field of synthetic biology, legal matters, and ethical issues. The audience engagement during the discussion wasamazing and even exceeded our expectations. This created an interesting platform for us to learn more about how other people from different social and political background perceived biotechnology and its advancements.

Nordic Meetup

The iGEM Nordic Meetup (NIC) originated in Uppsala in 2015 as an opportunity to meet other teams from Northern Europe, get some feedback on your projects and to set ground for future collaborations for the teams. It became a tradition that the next NIC is hosted by a team that wins the best presentation contest during the meetup. This year, teams have met in Copenhagen at an event hosted by iGEM UCopenhagen. During the first day we bonded over games and activities provided by the team. The second day was spent with lectures helping us with various issues that we might run into during iGEM competition such as communication with media or ethical issues. Each team also presented their project and gained feedback from iGEM judges to adress possible critical issues they might experience. Lively discussions continued until late night hours with a BBQ dinner prepared. Best presentation award this year went to the newest team in the Nordic iGEM world: iGEM Lund. The voting by other iGEM teams' representatives was almost unanimous and in agreement with the judges' opinions. It was clear that iGEM Lund has almost never ending enthusiasm about their project and unique spirit and attitude among the teams! But even though we did not win the prize our team still got a shoutout from the judges for having a reasonable and interesting project. We also got a great and interesting feedback and suggestions from other teams that helped us a lot while progressing in the project. Thanks to NIC we got the chance to meet other teams that our close to us and it gave us a great base for the other collaborations we had during the competition. Teams represented at NIC: DTU-Denmark, SDU Denmark, UCopenhagen, Aalto-Helsinki, Chalmers-Gothenburg, Linköping_Sweden, Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund.

Postcards

This year, our team had a very active and talented graphical design group. We decided to take part in a collaboration organised by iGEM Düsseldorf Cologne. The team was tasked to design a postcard related to synthetic biology and iGEM. Then we exchanged these postcards with other teams! This collaboration was a great fun and a chance to get to know other teams and their projects a little bit better.

iGEM Lund

As a first year team for iGEM it is hard to know what to expect and it is very valuable to get all the help you can. Uppsala has been in the competition for 9 years running. We have a lot of experience and knowledge to share with a starting team. Representatives from Lund and Uppsala met at NIC conference and decided to talk about how to run a team. We had a Skype meeting with Lund to share general tips and tricks for running an iGEM team. The tips were everything from how present in the best possible way at the Jamboree to organization of the team. Lund initiated most of the general questions and we were happy to help out. We hope that our advice has helped them and we thought it was a great way to share our experience.