iGEM Mini Jamboree at Imperial
I was proud to act as host for the iGEM Mini Jamboree (~100 attendees) at Imperial’s White City campus today, although my own role was largely supportive and pastoral. The whole event was conceived, planned, programmed, set up, led and chaired by the students themselves, with Vasily Vanifatov leading the effort.
The opening keynote was given by Prof. Tom Ellis, one of the UK’s leading figures in synthetic biology.
Teams from Tarragona, Sheffield, Bochum, Aachen, IONIS Education Group, Oxford, UCL, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge (iDEC), Sorbonne, Aix-Marseille, and Imperial then delivered their pitches and received questions and comments from an excellent panel of experts: Sonja Billerbeck, Amritpal "Amrit" Singh, PhD, and Kyle Jonsson. Amrit’s advice summarised with the panel’s feedback at the end was highly concrete and will surely help the teams prepare for the Grand Jamboree in Paris.
Many congratulations to the Bochum team for winning the Mini Jamboree, and to the runners-up, Oxford and UCL!
We then enjoyed a #SynBio “fireside” panel discussion with highly successful bioengineers Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, PhD, Alicia Graham, PhD and Henrik Hagemann FRSC FIOM3.
The event concluded with a highly engaging keynote from Connie O'Donnell from bit.bio.
Many congratulations to the Imperial iGEM team for such a successful event, and huge thanks to all the speakers, judges and panellists for being so generous with their time and for supporting the iGEM teams with their insight and invaluable feedback.
A huge thank you to our sponsors for their generous support of the event and for joining us: Gurpreet Sehra from CliniSciences Group, Jess Simpson from Twist Bioscience, Akshay Acharya and Gaofeng Zhang from Thermo Fisher Scientific and Kyle Jonsson from Nucleate UK.
We are also very grateful to the remaining sponsors of the Imperial iGEM team: Anthropic, Atlassian, SnapGene, GenScript, BMG LABTECH, Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc., MedChemExpress LLC, New England Biolabs, Geneious, Ailurus Bio, Integrated DNA Technologies, Department of Infectious Disease and National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial at Imperial Medicine, and Departments of Life Sciences and Bioengineering at Imperial College London
See some of you at the iGEM Competition Grand Jamboree in Paris this November!
