OpenWetWare talk:Presentations/iGEM 2006 Teach the teachers workshop

OWW presentation on June 12?

 * RS 15:16, 9 May 2006 (EDT): A similar workshop is happening at Imperial College for iGEM (a student design competition in biology) on June 12, 2006. I've asked Stephen (since he opted to be on the Steering committee) if he is willing to go and give a presentation on OWW, but anyone else who is local and is willing to help out would be welcome.  There was a similar workshop in Boston and Jason presented OWW there (see the project page for details on the presentation).  List your name here if you'd like to volunteer.  One or two people should be sufficient.


 * 1) Stephen Meister (probably)
 * 2) Volunteer 2

What is iGEM?
iGEM is an acronymn for the international Genetically Engineered Machines competition. There has been a pretty long history of successful robotics competitions in which teams of students design and build robots. Similarly, in iGEM, teams of students design and build biological systems by specifying a DNA sequence that will encode their system of interest. For example, a team from UCSF and UT Austin programmed bacteria to respond to light by fusing a light sensitive domain to a naturally occurring signaling domain in Escherichia coli.

Who is the audience?
At the Teach the Teachers workshop on June 12, there will be faculty and graduate student advisors from various teams (mostly from the EU). For instance, there will be people there from ETH Zurich, University of Cambridge and more. The list of registrants can be found at the registration site. (It has only just been announced so there are no/few registrants as of yet.)

Why is OWW relevant to iGEM?
Since there is a pretty large synthetic biology community on OWW, we want to make iGEM'ers aware of OWW as a resource. There are a lot of protocols and background information relevant to iGEM on the site as well as a cohort of people available to comment on projects and help with experiments etc. Plus, since there will be lots of faculty who have their own labs at this event ... we want to take advantage of the iGEM workshop to show them that OWW is useful not only for their iGEM team but also their own research lab.

Are there slides?
Mostly, we've just been going to the wiki page during the presentation and clicking around the site to show them relevant pages. Hence, we don't have separate powerpoint slides. If you prefer slides, that's fine too.