Human Practice

Conferences :

Our team took part in conferences, doing a presentation of the iGEM competition as well as of our project.

• EccoXXXIV: The Ecco XXXIV is a yearly conference at the Pasteur Institute where scientists present their work. Our team was presented with the possibility of presenting our work at the end of the conference. We were there given the chance to present and promote our work on plastic pollution and synthetic biology.

  See our video!

• Maison des Océans: The "Maison des océans" or "Institut Océanographique" offers each week a conference by professionals to the public. We talked about our project after a wonderful presentation by "Opération 7ème Continent", a group of scientists and explorers that sail in the ocean to observe how plastic waste impacts our ecosystem. This event happened for us after a Skype conversation with the organizers.

  See our video!

• Amgen Scholars Cafe: The Pasteur Institute is one of the host Research Centers of the Amgen Scholars Program. The students asked us to present our project briefly at one of their weekly gathering.

We also took part in a few scientific events, without being the organizers. We attended the Patchwork meeting in a Parisian cafe where scientists, artists and journalists came to talk about opening the public to the main scientific issues of our time. We went to the World’s Ocean Day at the UNESCO where we took part in the UNESCO Campus where a number of students discussed how we could change the way people think about Climate Change, and more specifically the way it affects the ocean. The problem of plastic pollution in the ocean also came up. We sat in the several conferences. We also went to support the French Famelab Contestants in Paris at the regional and the national finals. At this event, the contestants, mostly PhD students and researchers, had to sum up a scientific subject in 3 minutes. The themes were very diverse and varied from cancer to gravity to name a few.

Public engagement :

At the beginning of the summer, we hosted 9th graders at the Pasteur Institute. We gave them a small lecture about the basics of Biology and Crystallography before taking them to the lab. We showed them how to perform a Western Blot, and then we supervised the making of their own. After this little session, we taught them a bit about microscopes, how it works and how to use them. We were very pleased that they chose us and Institut Pasteur to learn more about science !