Team:UMass-Dartmouth/outreach

First Year Summer Institute Seminar (August 3 - August 6)

In addition to our research goals, we set out to educate our community on synthetic biology with the hopes of inspiring another generation of researchers to maintain and improve upon our work. Each summer, UMass Dartmouth hosts a week long program called Freshman Summer Institute for incoming freshman engineers. In anticipation of the arriving bioengineering students, UMass Dartmouth’s iGEM team carefully designed lesson plans and labs for the students to learn basic molecular techniques such as heat shock transformations, miniprep plasmid extractions, restriction digests, and gel electrophoresis. At the end of this week, the students assembled a poster and presented this newfound knowledge to their future peers and professors. With this exposure, the iGEM team hoped to prepare the students for both the rigor of their academic courses as well as any potential research endeavors.