The concept of the European Experience 2016 was both simple and bold: two teams would work together in order to organize in Paris the gathering of most of the iGEM 2016 European teams.

It all started during the brainstorming sessions of our team. We talked about the previous editions of the iGEM competition, and realized that, if America or Asia had regional meetups every year, Europe didn’t have one since the end of the « official » iGEM regional meetups system. We therefore had the idea, for the first time in the history of the iGEM, to organize a big event of our own. We also wanted to make this event a collaborative project with another iGEM team. That is why we worked with the Evry iGEM team to carry out the project.

The event, named The European Experience 2016, aimed to bring together European iGEM teams in order to:

After 3 hours of exchanges and a good meal, everyone ends up in the auditorium for the two round tables.

Throughout the whole day, the iGEM teams of the world could live The European Experience 2016 on Facebook and Twitter with hashtags #EE16 and #iGEM2016.

Furthermore, we organized a retransmission of the two conferences on the iGEM IONIS Facebook page, live and free!
The opening ceremony was led by Paul Indelicato, deputy director of Thierry MANDON’s cabinet, Secretary of State for Higher Education and Research.

The first thing to know about this symposium is that we wanted to organize an event as much entertaining and sharing as possible. That’s why we planned a main scientific symposium through two roundtables to maximize the exchange between the speakers and the audience.
Then, we decided to focus our both roundtables about synthetic biology of course. However, we didn’t want to only deal with sciences in a global way.
That’s why we planned to divide our scientific symposium into two related but different roundtables.

We concluded the event by having a rooftop cocktail on top of the building. The cocktail, prepared by ourselves, was a V.I.P event in order to thank the speakers for coming. Some professionals were also there, along with some school directors, and of course, the team members !

This cocktail was the perfect opportunity for us to have more in-depth discussions with the professionals, and we really enjoyed it. Shortly after that, we headed out to the place where the party would be located.

This party was the pinnacle of our event. We organized it in a dedicated hall, and invited everyone to come ! Some suprises were also planned, such as the retransmission of the Quarterfinals Euro Cup match (Germany vs. Italy), a beautiful balloon ark and even some fire-breathing fun !

Again, the safety and comfort of everyone was our top priority during the whole event. That is why we managed to get a partnership with Heetch, a French version of Uber, allowing everyone to come safely to the hotel by car for less than 3€ per person.

Thanks to Heetch, everyone could party all night long, and no one had any issue with the Parisian transportations ! Al the people had to do was to have fun and to call a taxi.

As Sunday was the day of departure for all the iGEM teams, we wanted to give them some free time to enjoy France in general, and Paris in particular. However, we thought it would be nice for those who wanted it to have the occasion to discover the city with their fellow iGEMers, and we therefore organized a set of tours for everyone to enjoy ! Led by the Evry students, these tours were centered about some specific areas of Paris, such as the Jardins du Luxembourg and the Museum of Natural History.

Festival Vivant is an initiative of the European project Synenergene.

"Living bodies grow everywhere. Fields, fermenters, biorefineries produce innovative substances for eating, building, driving, healing or dressing. Biotech is called upon to customize organisms the way we want to. This bioeconomy is shaping the world to come. From 15th to 17th September 2016 at the University Paris Diderot campus, the FESTIVAL VIVANT brings together all those who transform, use, observe the living world in order to cooperate about: bioeconomy, biotechnology, agriculture, for a sustainable future?"

For the edition 2016 LIVING FESTIVAL, iGEM IONIS team was present in the «Village des initiatives » (Innovative village) We were there to present the Quantifly project to the world. As the event was open to the public, everyone could come and discover who we were and what we were working on. We had the pleasure to explain our project to children, old people, scientists, artists…

We also had a big surprise when we realized that 4 iGEM teams were also there ! It was a great time for all of us, and we got to spend more time with them, which is always nice ! Seeing them again after the European Experience and the iGEM Île-de-France Meetup was really fun.

In order to make students from Sup’Biotech discover what the iGEM was and hopefully to convince them to participate next year, we decided to do something that has been organized for the first time by the iGEM IONIS 2015 team: the iGEM Week. We managed to free some time in the students courses to organize project presentations and to get to spend some time with them answering their questions about what was Synthetic Biology, the iGEM and what we were doing. We also performed some food selling throughout the week in order to raise funds for our project Last but not least, we also organized a contest for the students: by groups, they had to design a scientific poster based on a previous iGEM project. The posters would be evaluated by a selection of teachers from the school, on various criteria such as design and scientific content. There were prizes to win for the best posters, and we had a lot of fun showing them all to the school !

On the last day, we organized a giant BBQ for all the school: the results were announced, and everyone had fun, students and teachers.

This event was an amazing thing to do, and we hope it will help to create an “iGEM-supportive” state of mind in our school ! We also hope to have motivated some students to create their own iGEM team next year, so that the iGEM IONIS team can last over time and become bigger and bigger !

iGEM IDF Meetup

The iGEM IDF (Île-de-France) Meetup was a collaboration between iGEM IONIS, iGEM Pasteur and iGEM Evry. It was originally intended to be hosted in La Paillasse, the lab where the iGEM IONIS team is working, and ended up being in the Pasteur campus.
The iGEM IONIS team was in charge of designing the event’s logo, and its members were helping out teams as staff.

6 teams were participating to this meetup, and spent a whole day of fun, with some conferences and project presentations, more in-depth than what has been done during the European Experience. The presentations were also assessed by some professionals and experts with different backgrounds (biology, engineering, design…), who were asking questions and investigating what the teams have been doing over their projects. Their detailed feed-back and reactions were very helpful and allowed us to see the different possible point of views about our projects !

Two conferences were also organized during the afternoon, and presented by two law students in the iGEM Pasteur team. They gave us an introduction of Intellectual Property, and how to manage it into the frame of Open Science. These were really helpful and helped us to have a better understanding of what the iGEM competition was about.

After the conferences all the teams gathered outside to eat, drink and play together during a collaborative picnic. This event was the opportunity to talk with iGEMers from Paris and to exchange tips and advices for the future.
This event, 1 month after the European Experience, was the perfect opportunity to hang out with our fellow iGEMers from all around Ile-de-France, and discover how every team was made, how they were working, and to share a few tips around a good drink ! We had a fantastic day, and everyone was happy in the end. We later met these teams again, (see Festival du Vivant), and it was always some great moments that we spent together !

The smaller amount of people that were at this meetup allowed us to share more with them, and not only did we met fellow iGEMers, but we could also make friends with a lot of amazing people !

Throughout the year, our team participated as staff to three sports events, in order to raise funds for the project and the Boston Giant Jamboree.

We spent a few weekends on these events: most of the times, it meant going on site very early in the morning to help the « official staff » on the logistic. We then had various roles, going from road blocking to medal handling, through dicing fruits for the runners… We once had to run the main stand for the whole day, and welcomed every runner, gave them their bags, maps, etc ! We also had some more uncommon roles, such as helping bike runners go down stairs under the rain… These events could sometimes be hard, but they always were very fun, and we were on a very good mood all day long: no matter how tired we were, everyone was here for a greater cause, and we got to meet very nice people there. These events were also great occasions for team building and group cohesion, as we had to work together fast and efficiently, just like during the iGEM competition.

We helped the staff of these events:

10 km du Neuf, March 20th 2016

Vélo Tour May, May 22th 2016

Disneyrun, to Disneyland Paris on 24th & 25th September 2016