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. The University of Michigan 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.




Crowdfunding
In addition to volunteering at these camps, the team also made use of crowdfunding platform, Experiment (formerly Microryza) to share about synthetic biology and our project. We created a page that included written and video descriptions of our project, as well as explanations of how backers could help make Aptaper a reality. With the online community’s help, not only were we able to raise 109% of our $2,000 goal, but we also reached a total of 1396 people who learned about synthetic biology and its possible applications. To learn more about our crowdfunding efforts, please explore our Experiment page.