Team:BostonU/Industry

Monsanto

This summer, our team was fortunate enough to not only be sponsored by Monsanto, but also to visit this company and speak with company representatives.

A Monsanto representative named Prashanth Vishwanath visited BU to learn about our research and tell us more about the company. He spoke with us about the company’s mission and the type of work that was being conducted at the Cambridge site. We got to ask questions and learn more about how the company fit in the wider synthetic biology industry. We also got to talk to him about our project idea, and learn more about how conditional dimerization of proteins might actually have industrial applications.

Later in the summer, we got an opportunity to tour the Monsanto Cambridge facilities. We heard a presentation from a Monsanto researcher talking more about different areas of research that Monsanto is conducting. We also got to give a quick pitch of our project to other Monsanto members, which was a great experience in trying to communicate our project without any visual aids. We got to walk through labs and see all of the equipment that researchers there use - and much of it looked very similar to our own lab at BU.

Thanks to Monsanto for sponsorship and for the site visit! We really appreciate it.