Europe Teachers Workshop/Team reports

One student found out about Venter/minimal genome and came across sythetic bio and iGEM
Info session - 25 students interested
Picked team of ~12 students based on motivation letter not grades from across 4 disciplines
2 molec bio labs
Center for biosciences, biotech, bioinformatics is donating money
Expect to learn

Enthusiastic student whose father was in England and had heard about it, national newspapers, starting a new institute in Synthetic Bio
Want to integrate it into teaching courses
Advertised in University newspaper for students (and other professors)
Team of 12 students - biology, physics, chemistry
Meet 2x/week
Money from DSM (industry), new Syn Bio institute, University
Expect to meet other people and be active in the field

Heard about iGEM through Drew
Team of 8 students who approached the school for support
Started thinking about projects around January
French Embassy is supporting them and the Paris team
Use this opportunity to start a course in SynBio (starting in June)
- School of Physics is also interested
Working on cell division control in yeast

2001 EPFL launched new life sciences which yielded interested faculty
Sent out letters and put up posters and recruited life sciences and engineering
Info session yielded 30 people, 20 applied via a proposal
Each group (4 of 3 people) proposed a project and they voted democratically on which one to proceed with
Are currently modeling to see whether project is feasible

Heard of it through Nature article
Wanted to have a team in 07 but couldn't get funding so this year started earlier
Bioinformatics (3) and micro bio (2) and comp sci (1)
Based in school of computational science
BBSRC funding for bioinformatics and Society for Applied Biology funding
Meeting 1x/week with seminars and exercises -- interdisciplinary!
Looking to setup synbio masters in the future

Stumbled on iGEM through another university's website
Difficult to find students because of a late start (students had already setup plans)
Team of 6 students - 3 life sci, 1 mechanical eng, 1 biomedical, 1 bioinformatician
Sensors and switches are popular prospects
Dept of biotech., Faculty of applied science, and Dept of nanotech are providing funding; Nanobioscience department might be started also housing synbio

Students learned about iGEM through some exchange program with Cambridge University
University funding, Polish Foundation of Science (money comes in parts, contingent on success!)
Expecting to win (means we expect to succeed in our project so we can go to the Jamboree :)
9 students - biotech, bio, chem

Returning team; originally started with synbio club
Club continues to meet throughout the year and decided to focus on teaching foundational aspects as a way to have topics for the club
Students on team/club spending time in lab with high school students
Funding is difficult because of not being tied with a specific university; obtained help from Embassy, Every Computational team, Betancourt Foundation
- Focusing on obtaining money for several years instead of searching for funding every year
Starting an interdisciplinary masters program to get credit

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