Team:IOANNINA/Communication
In order to spread knowledge regarding Synthetic Biology, we brainstormed about different approaches we could use to achieve our goal. Having access to our university community enabled us to organize a lecture for undergraduate students. Specifically, we talked about Chemical Synthetic Biology to first-year students (age: 18-19 years old) from the Department of Chemistry. Then, we interacted with a younger audience that of high school students (age: 16-18 years old). A presentation of our team and Synthetic Biology’s applications was given at the American Farm School of Thessaloniki. We also organized a webinar about Antimicrobial Resistance, One Health and their interaction in collaboration with IVSA Thessaly. That webinar was orientated towards the scientific community, including students from relevant fields and academics. Other two activities towards the academic community were our participation in HelMSIC’s conference and our project reveal, where we presented our work as a research team of our University and our participation in the 27th Scientific Congress of Hellenic Medical Students, where we had the chance to talk about Synthetic Biology tools with other iGEM teams from Greece. Finally, our educational approaches included the general public in the city of Ioannina. We participated in three Save your Hood cleaning actions and presented the alarming issue of AMR in the specific ecosystem of Ioannina (Lake Pamvotida) and Synthetic Biology’s promising potential and applications. Another attempt to approach the non-expert broader audience was through our workshop in TEDx MavilliSquare 2021, where we explored the stages through a Synthetic Biology project. Engagement with a science and a non-expert audience was also achieved through some info posts (IVSA Thessaly) and some quizzes about Space Synthetic Biology (George Antoniou) on Instagram. We also appeared in local TV and radio and talked about our work and the importance of Synthetic Biology. Besides communication, we tried to provide the public with some material relevant to Synthetic Biology. The first one is the comic book “The war of Germs” written by team CCU Taiwan and translated into Greek by team IOANNINA in terms of our collaboration. The translated version of the comic book is now published in a greek science blogspot. The second one is an article about Space Synthetic Biology in Greek, in which George Antoniou contributed. It has been an enjoyable interaction to share this knowledge with both science and non-expert audiences!
Communication