Team:Michigan/Outreach

Outreach

Women in Science Engineering (WISE)

This year our team reached out to the community by educating middle-and-high-school-aged girls on the tools used in synthetic biology. We hope to help future scientists get involved at an early age and promote gender diversity. U of M hosts an annual summer camp called GISE (Girls In Science and Engineering) aimed at getting middle school aged girls involved with science. We collaborated with GISE by leading a camp session on synthetic biology. We helped the campers extract DNA from strawberries, bananas, and human skin cells from a mouth swab.

Computational Biology Camp The Michigan Synthetic Biology team also volunteered at a Computational Biology Camp for high school students interested in computer science, math, biology, and medicine. During the camp, students focused on how genomics plays a role in diseases and symptoms, as well as how to use computational biology to identify genes that could be linked to particular diseases or symptoms. We taught high schoolers how to use pipettes, PCR and their importance.This camp was impactful because it exposed high school students to biomedicine, biotechnology, and medical genomics, in addition to helping spread the word on synthetic biology.

Experiment