Inclusion

Overview

Aimed at building an open and welcoming scientific community, we figured out to share lab experience for students from High school affiliated to Shanghai JiaoTong University. Moreover, we analyzed the sociological attributes of people involved in our questionnaire.

In this session, we concluded these diversity & inclusion features, and our team composition as well.

Diversity in questionnaire

To obtain whether there is a significant change in the knowledge and acceptance of gene editing among the population in China under COVID-19 epidemic, we design a new questionnaire containing some of the same questions based on the questionnaire designed by the 2019 team about cognition and attitudes of the population in each region of China towards gene editing and other biotechnical tools. With the aim of ensuring the diversity in samples and giving people from different backgrounds equal access to the development of cutting-edge biological science and technology, we choose to administer these questionnaires to people of different ages, occupations, religious beliefs, and education backgrounds.

According to the results of these questionnaires, we observed a shifting trend in cognition and acceptance of gene editing among Chinese through the Covid-19 epidemic —— being more informed while cautious, which is a favorable change. At the same time, there is reason to believe that in the future, gene editing technology will be optimized in line with changing cognition and eventually be widely used.

Click our supplements page to see details.

High school students in lab

To make synthetic biology more accessible to people of different backgrounds and academic levels, we introduce the basic knowledge of synthetic biology to students of the High school affiliated to Shanghai JiaoTong University. And we instruct them to learn the basic operations of biological experiments. More importantly, we invite several students into our lab and lead them to design and conduct experiments to verify the transcriptional activation effect of dCas9-ω. They develop strong interest to synthetic biology through experiments, enhancing the impact of iGEM in broader population.

Click our education page to see details.

Diversity in the our team

This year our team gathers members from different schools，including the School of Life Science and Biotechnology, School of Agriculture and Biology, School of Biomedical Engineering, School of Pharmacy, School of Medicine, and even the School of Electrical Information and Electronic Engineering. Having different academic backgrounds ，we meet because of iGEM. The diversity in academic backgrounds provides our team with infinite glitter of inspirations, which greatly help us in proposing and designing our project. At the same time, from freshman to senior, our team members not only bring fresh energy but also abundant experimental experience, guaranteeing the continuous progress on our project.

Click our team page to see details.

Acknowledgements

SJTU-BioX-Shanghai

contact us

Contact us: sjtuigem@gmail.com or sjtuigem@gmail.com

Bio-X Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dongchuan Rd. 800