Difference between revisions of "Team:UGent Belgium/HP/Silver"

Human Practices: silver

Throughout the Dewpal project we undertook several dissemination and communication activities to reach out to all relevant stakeholders in order to maximize its impact. Besides engaging the several stakeholders in order to translate our research into real-life applications, also responsible research and innovation were discussed and promoted. We assessed the different opportunities but also critically analyzed the different risks involved.

Academia

Several activities are being undertaken to inspire the youth to pursue a future in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). To this end we tried to make science, and synthetic biology in particularly, more attractive (notably to young people) and to increase society's appetite for innovation. Furthermore, we discussed our project with several experts in the various fields involved to improve our project and to help us with several aspects. Besides communication of our project and results to peers and the scientific community, we also discussed responsible innovation and research.

Seminars

• Synthetic Biology KUL April 15 2016
• Kick-off event Center of Synthetic Biology Ghent University September 16 2016
• PhD seminars October 17 2016 on the faculty of Bioscience engineering of UGent

Outreach

• UGent Faculty of Bioscience Engineering newsletter
• UGent Student newspaper Schamper
• Facebook page UGent Faculty of Bioscience Engineering
• Twitter page UGent Faculty of Bioscience Engineering

Experts input

• Deepak Mehta (3Dee)
• Kurt Van Houtte (FabLab)
• Prof. Dan Fernandez (CSUMB)
• Ali Oğulcan Dülger (Timelab)
• Winnie Poncelet (ReaGent)
• Pieter Vantorre (FishingCactus)

Industry

Our iGEM team is strongly committed to explore effective exploitation of the Dewpal project results. We initiated key contacts, by seminars, sponsoring and crowdfunding with angels, VCs in additional to valuable contacts in established environmental industries. As such we reached out to key players in the value chain:

• Specialized media
  • Interview with Digital trends
  • 3Ders
  • Biovox (in press)
• Outreach to industrial companies in both the 3D-printing and biotech field
• Several meetings and discussions with Deepak Mehta (3Dee) on optimizing our shape for sustainability and durability

Society

In our project we wanted to tackle a huge societal problem and demonstrate that innovative and cutting-edge technologies such as synthetic biology and 3D printing provide solutions. In order to reach the general public and to make them familiar with our project and synthetic biology in general, dissemination was done using modern, popular and interactive media:

• Interview with (inter)national popular media: De Knack (BE), De Volkskrant (NL), etc.
• Dewpal is present on social media, e.g. Facebook and Twitter

Environmental & economical impact

Water scarcity is a major problem worldwide. More than 1 billion people suffer from physical water scarcity and a quarter of the human population lack sufficient water due to economical reasons, such as the lack of infrastructure to take water from rivers and aquifers (see following figure).

Additionally, in regions of physical water scarcity the average income per capita is rather low which hinders the development of infrastructures to collect freshwater (for example by filtering seawater) (see following picture).