Team:Greece United/Collaborations/iGEMMeetUp

iGEM Meet Up:

Greek Edition

It was customary for all Greek iGEM teams to meet once in a while all together with our beloved Ambassador Leandros Tsiotos, to talk and pose questions. In one of those meetings, many teams expressed that they were hoping to organize an iGEM Meet Up conference. Since we are 8 Greek teams we realized that 8 different meet ups would be an exaggeration so it was proposed we collaborate to organize one big meet up! Five of the teams agreed, including us, so we got started to host the biggest Greek iGEM MeetUp up to that moment!

The cooperation with other teams that had a shared vision with us was immersive! Each team set a representative to participate in the organizing committee, and they met weekly to cooperate and co-organize all the details of this conference. The organizing committee were: Anastasia Theodosiadou - iGEM Thessaloniki, Celia Petriki- iGEM Crete, Marianna Ioannidou - iGEM Athens, Nefeli Zikou - iGEM NOUS and Sotiris Dimitriadis - iGEM Thrace.


Figure 1: iGEM NOUS members attending, watching and presenting the conference.


They decided to host a 2-day online conference that included a wide range of topics and speakers. It took place in 24th and 25th of July 2021. Hoping for a wider audience, the main language of the conference was English, and the promotion invited iGEM teams from all over the world, as well as non-iGEM related people. The title: “iGEM Meet Up: Greek Edition”.

The whole conference included biology, computer science, entrepreneurship, graphics design and other topics. The common axes all lectures revolved around was the antithesis in the course the speakers had followed. We wanted to show how people with a completely different background can end up working in similar fields and illuminate their different point of views in a subject or field of study.

Day #1


The first day started of with an introduction of the organizing teams through a video. You can see ours below.

Figure 2: NOUS presentation video in "iGEM Meet Up: Greek Edition" conference.


Then the first 2 speakers opened the thematic “Road to Synthetic Biology”. First one, renounced Greek synthetic biologist George Skretas made an introduction to synthetic biology and explained his change of fields, since he started out as a chemical engineer and later on focused on biology. The second one was Alexandra Bisia, a doctoral student that started as undergraduate in Biology, participated in iGEM and then focused on Synthetic Biology.

Next thematic was Graphics Design, with two workshops. One from Alex Nazlidis, a biomedical designer that studied Molecular Biology & Genetics and then turned to graphics, and the second one from our very own Pavlos Chatzoudis, who studied animation and engaged in biomedical designing through his work in our team.

Moving on to the “Entrepreneurship: ALERT!” section, the speakers had experience with start ups from different sides. Antonis Livieratos an Associate Professor at NKUA and Scientific Advisor at Archimedes (Center for Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship) helps teams with ideas to turn them into startups and reach the market, while Simon Bensasson, has a wide experience of creating his own startups.

Day #2

The second day started of with a presentation from each organizing team about the troubleshooting process they experienced with their projects. What problems occurred, how they solved them and what changes had to happen to reach to the point they are today. All presentations were really informative and let us understand each other’s projects, ask questions and realize that we are all in this together, our struggles are the same.

Next part was “a nBLAST from the past” were iGEM Alumni joined us to answer questions about their experience, such us “What was the most random thing (unrelated to your field of expertise) that you learned through iGEM?”, “Tell us a fun iGEM story.”, “How did iGEM help you in your next projects?”. The alumni that participated were the past members Platon Megagiannis (iGEM Thessaloniki 2019), Nikos Kalavros (iGEM Athens 2019), Anastasis Galanis (iGEM Athens 2019), Kostas Ragkios (EPFL 2019), but also the ambassador Leandros Tsiotos and the judge Dimitris Michailidis.

This part was not a formal presentation, rather a friendly conversation, through which we took a glimpse of our future as iGEM alumni. It was a chance to realize that all will be over at some point, and we should learn to cherish this experience, even the hard parts.

After those followed an interactive Workshop about Medical Statistics by Panagiotis Kartsidis, a mathematician and doctoral student in the field of Neuroscience. He explained statistic mistakes, errors and how they could be misinterpreted. A really useful workshop during a pandemic, when we are overwhelmed by medical statistics, such as positivity indexes or mortality rates.

Last but not least, we listened to two amazing lectures in the category “The Brain: Bio & Machine”, by Dr. Panagiota Poirazi who works on dendrites and their complex function and Dr. Ioannis Tsamardinos who works on automated machine learning. They analyzed the two different sides of the same coin, by talking about the biological and the computational side of the brain by referring to studies they participated, basic principles of brain function and artificial intelligence.

Below you can see photos during the conference and the promotion posts with the schedule.

Figure 3: Promotion templates of the conference.



The whole conference ran smoothly, and we had positive feedback from the participants, the speakers, and other teams. At the end of the first day, we also had the chance to meet with all the Greek teams, when we played games and had some drinks in a Discord server.