Team:UParis BME/Communication

Communication is an essential factor in the scientific progress equation. Unless enveloped in an appropriate and clear message, the most innovative discoveries will never make it pass your lab notebook. Furthermore, to have a pronounced positive impact on society, it is crucial to make your message clear for the people outside of your immediate science community. With this thought in mind, our team has decided to split our early communications into two streams to target the scientific peers and the more general audience. As we worked to encourage the dialogue and generate feedback, we realised that the both groups were too large, preventing us from delivering a perfectly tailored message. Subsequently, we ended up with multiple communication subcategories. The scientific community stream was split into internal (University) and external (other teams and broader community) tracks, while the general audience was targeted with three general approaches: succinct social media posts, detailed public engagement talks at conferences and events, and educational activity for middle and high schools. Do you want to learn what we did in more detail? Click on your favourite section and read more about everything we are proud to share!

Fête de la Science 2021

Every year, the Fête de la Science is organised all around France by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. It is a national science festival for scientists, professors, educators, and students to share their passion and curiosity for sciences and innovations with the public through numerous workshops, games, conferences, and visits to laboratories, museums and industrial sites. It is destined for people of all ages and all backgrounds. This great event is the occasion to raise public awareness about the role of science in society (as well as its limitations), promote the knowledge exchange between researchers and citizens, showcase the work of the scientific community and encourage young people to become scientists. This year, our team participated in Fête de la Science at Université de Paris and at Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.

At Université de Paris, three of our members participated in a live conference on YouTube, discussing our ambitions, our project, its importance, and how our team experiences throughout the journey. With this conference, we had a unique opportunity to talk about synthetic biology, cancer, early diagnosis, and answer the audience's questions in the live chat.

At Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 4 members of our team were present for a full day on site, along with the 5 other Parisian teams. We supported a conference about synthetic biology and a DNA extraction workshop. More specific to our project, our team ran a conference about our research and the iGEM adventure as a new team. And, of course, we answered all the burning questions asked by our audience. We also organized a small workshop where we invited the public, mostly families and young kids, to play a game to discover cancer risks and how to avoid them. You can find more details in this section.

Reaching out to youth in schools

We believe that communication doesn’t only involve the science community, but also the younger generations. So, during September-October, our team was glad to have an opportunity to present our project and talk about synthetic biology in a middle school and a high school in the Paris area. Together, we played games to discover synthetic biology and cancer and discussed a bit to understand their thoughts about these subjects. More details can be found in this section.

Social media

We used our platforms on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) to communicate about our project and our iGEM journey. Member presentations, project reveal, facts about cancer and synthetic biology in general, weekly updates, fantastic Instagram stories, ... Our followers had the opportunity to follow an ambitious young team working to find a solution for one of mankind’s biggest health problems. You can find more details about our social media communication here.

Science community

Our earlier communication strategy was centered around engaging with the immediate scientific community. It was imperative to draw the attention of the experts, so we could receive their mentorship and feedback, and modify our plans accordingly. Furthermore, some of the internal events helped us grow our team and get access to the University’s funding. Finally, as we presented on our slides and texts, our colleagues asked multiple complex questions that helped us to refine our idea and account for the potential issues arising down the road. So, let’s see what exactly we started with.

Headhunting!

Long before getting our Instagram nametag, we started by presenting the project to other students in several graduate programs. This was so long ago, our slides did not even have the project colours yet! As we engaged in conversations with different experts in the fields of cancer biomarkers, exosome biology and biochemistry, we received an invitation to share our project at the Faculty’s Research Day. We were so excited to join the research teams positioned at our campus. Our presentation deck had to evolve a little, as we were now targeting the senior academic staff, hoping to benefit from their expertise. And, of course, we engaged people through other means, including recruiting calls sent out by email (mainly in French). Sometime around then we started to receive the attention of the funding bodies, and established an association that represented our project and officially declared our presence at Saint-Germain-des-Prés Campus.

A tale of two promo’s

To further promote our brand new association iGEM Université de Paris, we created a short promotional video that was presented across Université de Paris campuses. Please have a look at this super-early piece, we promise it is worth it! Especially now that you have a chance to compare it with a later promotional video we submitted to the iGEM a few weeks after. (The latter is available on the iGEM Video Universe in English, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Arabic!)

Reviews and Posters

Following the absolute success of our internal debut, we faced the necessity to submit academic Literature Reviews as a part of our Master’s program. Without further ado, some of us decided to pick the topics that aligned with our iGEM project and helped us design our Proof-of-Concept experiments. The reviews were then assessed by the Université de Paris experts, and now we are proud to present the result below!

Later down the line, we also produced two scientific posters that further facilitated the communication with the research community. The purpose of the first poster is to explain the problem that we have decided to tackle and to outline the proposed solution. The second poster was created a few months later to share the results that had been achieved by our dry lab team. Both pieces showcase the perfect color choice we made for our “brand”, so don’t hesitate to give them a download!

Going International!

As the iGEM teams around the world started to get more traction with their projects, more science communication opportunities have arised. For instance, we collaborated with the Maastricht team to publish an article in their Journal Initiative - give their wiki a glance, we are sure you will be curious to see the publications written and peer-reviewed by iGEMmers of all possible cultural and academic backgrounds!

We also had a chance to present at the numerous meetups with other iGEMmers, both vis-a-vis and in the online conference format. Alongside too many individual Zoom sessions and mini presentations, our track record also includes the Korean, Russian and French meetups (we actually helped organize the latter - learn more about our interactions with other teams in the Collaboration section).