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Human Practices

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Atlanta Science Festival

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PANELISTS

Mike Dudgeon – Georgia State House of Representatives

Mike Dudgeon currently serves as the state Representative for District 25. He is the Chair of the Education Subcommittee on Academic Support and is a member of the Science and Technology, Small Business, and Energy/Utilities/Telecom committees. Representative Dudgeon has bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, holds five U.S. patents, and has been an entrepreneur in the technology business his entire career.

John Cronier – FBI Special Agent

Special Agent (SA) John Cronier is assigned to the FBI Atlanta field office as the Weapons of MassDestruction Coordinator. He has more than 18 years of investigative and tactical operations experience with the FBI, primarily in domestic terrorism related matters.

Krista Queen – CDC Pathogen Discovery Team

Dr. Queen graduated from Louisiana State University with a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology. Her dissertation work centered on the role of Epstein Barr virus infection of epithelial cells and epigenetic changes caused by the virus. Currently, Dr. Queen is an ORISE Fellow researching the causes of human and animal diseases of unknown etiology and developing pathogen discovery assays.

Mark Styczynski – Georgia Tech Assistant Professor

Mark Styczynski is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering atGeorgia Tech. His group is using synthetic biology to develop diagnostic blood tests and analytical chemistry techniques to study cellular metabolism. He received his Ph.D. from MIT and his B.S. from the University of Notre Dame, both in chemical engineering.

Arri Eisen – Director of Emory’s Science and Society Program

Arri Eisen received his Bachelor’s of Science with honors in biology from UNC-Chapel Hill and hisdoctorate in biochemistry from UW-Seattle. He is currently a Professor of Pedagogy in Biology, the institure of Liberal Arts, and the Center for Ethics at Emory University, where he has been since 1990.

Next Generation Focus

This year, Lambert iGEM continued our partnership with Grace Chapel Church's "Next Generation Focus" program (NGF). This program focuses on promoting the importance of education from the very beginning, no matter a child's socioeconomic status. In particular, iGEM focuses on providing engaging scientific enrichment activities for children traditionally underrepresented in the STEM fields. By exposing kids to interesting hands-on activities not offered in their classrooms, we hope to present science as more than a series of facts to memorize and to spark a lifelong love of science. We spent a few Saturdays per semester through the year at NGF, hosting their "Science Days" to instill the fundamentals such as cells, anatomy games, and even chromatography. Many of these young students would not have the additional enrichment and educational supplements without NGF, and the high achieving, passionate science lovers that volunteer and drive the program are role models for the kids who might not have academic mentors at home.

Keep Charlie Moving

Operation Christmas Child

Lab Hacks:

Lab Hacks are little things we have found to help us as a high school team that doesn't have easy access to many expensive lab materials. They are very small changes to everyday lab procedures that produce just as effective results. Here are some we have used over the years, and we hope they help you as well!

Water Bath

Problem: Our team does not have brackets for our shaking water bath. This is a problem because it did not all us to secure it well enough to be able to incubate overnight.

Solution: We noticed the holes at the bottom of the shaking water bath's tray that are meant for the wingnuts to be secured. Instead of purchasing the expensive brackets (that don't fit correctly, since we have one small set)- we found that a configuration of rubber bands works much better and is much more secure. All you need to do is secure them to the bottom using two holes and pulling each end of a single rubber band through two close holes. You then pull one end through the loop of the other to secure. Continue doing this until you have four points of contact to the base and can then work on securing the glassware to the base using more rubber bands.

Blue Ice

Problem: When using clear microcentrifuge tubes or PCR tubes, the transparent plastic can get lost amongst the white ice/Styrofoam.

Solution: It is a simple solution to this frustrating problem- color the ice. One drop of blue food dye per 1L of water creates vibrant blue ice that can be easily differentiated from the tubes during wet lab work. It is also very helpful to have ice with a hole/dip in the middle to place tubes as opposed to strictly shaved ice (which runs the risk of diluting your solutions).

Keeping PCR Tubes Cold

Problem: As a high school lab, we don't have an ice block for our PCR tubes. This poses a problem because regular shaved ice could easily destroy the precise experiments by dripping melted chips into an open tube.

Solution: We fixed this by taking shaved ice, and packing it into a tray made for microcentrifuge tubes. We then used a single PCR tube to make indentations in the ice to use as a mold. This mold is then frozen for use in the next heat-sensitive lab. (Note: It is recommended that you use the centermost slots during your wet lab to avoid your ice channels from melting too quickly.)