Throughout the past year our team has been able to develop and implement education, science communication, and outreach materials related to scientific biology. Communication has played a key role in meeting our objectives.
Education has emphasized the importance of communication. Our team identified key demographics and created an education plan to impact these groups of people. We focused on children, high school students, and college students. Reaching out to the Sciencecenter, we planned an activity booth during the summer. The three activities we chose introduced synthetic biology and our project idea, collagen. The kids were able to engage in hands-on learning. After finishing their activities, the children and their parents filled out feedback forms on how we could improve our approach. The majority of the feedback was positive, and we received a few notes about simplifying the concepts further for younger children. Taking these notes, we altered our presentation materials as the activities progressed to tailor the experiences to the children’s ages. Another project we organized was high school science seminars. Inviting various HOSA and science clubs across California, Michigan, and New York to attend virtual meetings, we introduced these students to synthetic biology. The presentation materials we used were scaled to the educational level of high school students. The students participated in an open discussion at the end of the talk about synthetic biology and iGEM. Attending ENGRG 1050 classes, we were able to reach our third demographic group: college students. We talked to college engineering freshmen about synthetic biology and our team. We provided specific details about our project and encouraged them to take interest in iGEM.
In addition to communication through education, our team interviewed various experts in the biotech industry about our project. We identified three categories of people we wanted to contact: biotech companies, medical professionals, and professors. These three groups of people provided different perspectives on the current needs for collagen and gave valuable feedback on the methods used in our project. Clear communication was critical for these informational interviews. Team members introduced our project idea before asking questions to help improve it. An interview with Dr. Donohue gave us an idea of the medical applications that could use collagen. Biotech companies like Gelita and Rousselot gave us an idea of the current market for collagen. They mentioned that “vegan” collagen is an in-demand product, and also expressed interest in our idea saying it sounded like it had promise. Professors with similar research projects talked about how to model fluids and the bioreactor as well as testing hydrogels. These discussions were critical to give us an idea of where our project is needed and additional things to enhance our execution.
A third communication pathway our team explored was collaboration and partnership. Throughout the year our team organized and participated in various collaborative projects. At the beginning of our summer work, SUNY Oneonta iGEM invited our team to a virtual meet-up. During this meeting we were able to learn about other iGEM projects, present our project, and exchange advice for project applications. We also participated in a social media takeover with SUNY Oneonta where we switched Instagram accounts for the day. This increased our audiences and gave insight into other iGEM teams. The team was contacted by GTC Hong Kong and has been partnering with them for the past few months. Every other week the Hong Kong Human Practices Team meets with the Policy & Practices team to discuss outreach strategies and assist. Our team created a brief video about Cornell iGEM that was shared at high school “sharing sessions”. The Hong Kong team also contributed a video that was shared during our science club presentations. Due to the time difference both teams were unfortunately not able to coordinate live activities. Overall our collaborations and partnerships were valuable support during the development of our project. Communication played an important role in making these activities happen.
Team:Cornell/Communication
Communication