Congratulations to Team:Linköping for winning Best Project Award! To continue the tradition, they will get the honour of hosting the Nordic iGEM Conference 2022.
NiC in short
The Nordic iGEM Conference, or NiC for short, is a conference annually organized by and for the Nordic iGEM teams (Norway, Denmark, Finland & Sweden). Generally, the conference is hosted by one Nordic iGEM team. However, because of the pandemic the conferences both 2020 and 2021 were hosted by two teams where one team hosted the main event, and the other team were invited to help organise the conference. In 2021 the event was organised by us, iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg, together with Team:Linköping. The event took place in facilities at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden for all Swedish iGEM teams, while it was encouraged that other Nordic iGEM teams would meet up in respective countries, making it a semi-online conference. All participants were invited to a Zoom webinar while the general public could connect thought a Facebook livestream.
This year’s Nordic iGEM Conference took place over a two day period, where all teams competed for the “Best iGEM Project Award” and the honour of hosting the event the upcoming year. Apart from the annual competition everyone was invited to listen to guest lectures within STEM and participate in workshops related to synthetic biology. Teams were able to share their knowledge and experiences through the workshop topics, “The iGEM experience” and “Safety and implementation of GMO in iGEM”.
Although the event is based on a competition between teams, the foundation of the competition is meant to be preparations for the big jamboree. Therefore, not only do the teams get to practice presenting their project but an important aspect of the project presentation competition was to give and receive feedback. At the end of each presentation there was a designated time slot for an opposing team to ask questions and provide feedback to the presenting one, in addition to a short session for questions from other teams and livestream-viewers.
As the cherry on top each team received professional feedback from our four judges after the event for further chance of improving their presentations. Two judges were picked by us the Chalmers team and two judges were picked by the Linköping team. The judges are all knowledgeable in synthetic biology and judged the presentations according to the judging protocol provided below, the judges consisted of the following people:
Anne Farewell: Senior Lecturer, Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Gothenburg University
Linnea Österberg: PhD Candidate, SysBio Department, Chalmers University of Technology
Patrik Lundström:Associate Professor, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, Linköping University
Ganesh Mohite: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, Linköping University
Information
For an annual event that has been going on for multiple years is it surprising how little information is passed on to the next hosting team. Our team had a tough time understanding what the event was about, and how it is traditionally executed. Which might have been because there was no winner from 2020 and that we got the honour of hosting because no one else wanted to.
To make it easier for the upcoming years to host this event we not only created and uploaded all relevant documents to the Nordic iGEM conference slack-channel. But we have also created this section on our wiki containing documents that we sent out before the event, workshops during and what happened after the event. We hope this will make planning and hosting the event easier for upcoming teams.
To begin with where our situation a bit special because there was no clear host due to the competition being cancelled the previous year. So, we had to make sure no one else was planning on hosting it before taking on the task. But after all of that we could send out an application form to all teams. As the event came closer additional information was given to the teams, such as the schedule, presentation guidelines and much more.
First message:
Hey everyone!!
Hope you are doing great and that your projects are running smoothly. Now it’s less than a month left until this years NiC (three weeks to be more precise), and us at Chalmers and Linköping are all very excited.
To keep everyone up to date on what will happen and what needs to be prepared, we have compiled some important info!
T--Chalmers-Gothenburg--Information_about_NiC.pdfT--Chalmers-Gothenburg--Nordic_iGEM_Conference_Judging_form.pdf
Second message:
Heyyy everyone!
Now it’s close everyone, NiC is just around the corner!! Hope everyone has been able to prepare an awesome presentation while at the same time working on your projects!
There have been some changes in the presenting and feedback schedule, which we have posted on our slack channel. So check it out!! :)
T--Chalmers-Gothenburg--NiC_zoom_information.pdf
During
The main work during the event was to manage the Zoom webinar and live stream. Preparing coffee and much needed fika during the break for the Swedish teams. Except for that, some minor things were sent out in the slack-channel, such as the workshops. We also kept our social media pages well updated to spread the word about the live streamed presentations to as many people as possible.
Here are the arrangements files for the workshops used during NiC:
T--Chalmers-Gothenburg--Workshop1_The_iGEM_experience.pdfT--Chalmers-Gothenburg--Workshop_2_Safety_and_Implementation_of_GMO_after_iGEM.pdf
After
First we want to congratulate Team:Linköping for not only winning the well-deserved “Best Project Award”, but also two of the secondary prices, “Best Presentation” and “Best Creative Project”. We also want to congratulate iGEM Stockholm for winning the “Best Impact Award”.
As Team:Linköping won the “Best Project Award” they get the honour of hosting The Nordic iGEM Conference 2022!!!
So usually only the “Best Project Award” is handed out during the event. However, we decided to extend it into three minor categories, as a fun add on. But also due to the fact that we would not have any other competitions such as the poster competition.
One of the things that we did after the event was to send out an evaluation form for all participating teams to fill in of things to improve when it comes to hosting the conference. This feedback could be used by next year’s hosting team (in this case Team:Linköping). We also sent out feedback given by the judges to each team.
Thank You!
Thank you to all the participating teams for inspiring presentations and great discussions, to the presenters for interesting lectures, to the judges for your time and invaluable input on all presentations and finally to Team:Linköping for helping us planning and hosting. We had a lot of fun and we sincerely hope all of you did too!
