Team:UMaryland/Collaborations
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In the summer of 2015, UMaryland iGEM founded the first Mid-Atlantic Meet-up and hosted four teams: UVA, William and Mary, Duke, and Rock Ridge High School. Each team gave a 25 minute presentation of their project followed by a Q&A with the audience. We were also fortunate enough to have Special Agent Edward You of the FBI and UMD Professor Raymond St. Leger as guest speakers.
This summer, we included more iGEM teams in the Mid Atlantic Area by hosting the University of Pittsburgh, the US Naval Academy, the College of Willam and Mary, and University of Virginia iGEM Teams. We shared ideas and received feedback about ours projects during our discussion session. We were joined by guest speakers Dr. Eli Groban and Dr. Ganesh Sriram with opening remarks by Dr. Edward Eisenstein, an iGEM judge, who spoke about the overall iGEM experience, what it takes to make an iGEM team successful and the importance of human practices. Closing remarks were made by Ana Sifuentes from iGEM headquarters.
The presentation portion allowed teams to practice their project explanations before the Giant Jamboree. We also included a long discussion section after presentations so teams could get feedback from each other and from faculty advisors. We set aside time for the University of Virginia team to survey the four other teams for their biocontainment outreach and to gather feedback about their material on biocontainment. Furthermore, William and Mary was able to gather more participants for their Pen Pal program
Thank you to everyone who participated!
Speakers
Dr. Ganesh Sriram
Dr. Ganesh Sriram is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Bioengineering and Plant Biology graduate programs at UMD. He has earned his B.S. and M.S degrees in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Iowa State University. His current research pertains to metabolic engineering and systems biology, especially of eukaryotes.1Dr. Sriram presented several canon examples of using synthetic biology to optimize cell metabolism.
1. Bio from http://www.ench.umd.edu/faculty/sriram
Dr. Eli Groban
Dr. Eli Groban is the senior manager of of Bio/Nano Research at Autodesk, and has 6 patent applications on the development of new technologies for engineering proteins, metabolic pathways, and whole microbes. Eli will also be serving as an iGEM judge in the 2016 competition. He received his PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco, and his B.A. in Chemistry from Williams College.2 Dr. Groban spoke about his experience over the years working for a private company to make E. coli capable of industrial scale fatty alcohol production.
2. Bio from https://www.autodeskresearch.com/people/eli-grobanPictures
© University of Maryland iGEM 2016
