Team:Sorbonne U Paris/Inclusion
Inclusion
Our team is composed of fifteen mixed members studying in three different Parisian universities: Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris and l’Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). We are all starting our second year of Master Degree following very diverse specialities: Virology, Stem Cells, Management of Innovation, Microbial Ecology, Immunology, Developmental Biology, Biology & Engineering, Human Genetics, Microbiology, Evolutionary Genetics and Oncology. Having so many different biology backgrounds was very enriching for the development of the project. Moreover, for the project management aspect and its implementation, Chloé Piriou and Alexandra Teyssou studying Management of Innovation were of great contribution and guidance. This was a real plus for the project and also for our personal knowledge. iGEM is a competition based on genetic engineering but it is open to everyone who is interested and motivated.
We are an all native French speakers team and we are from all over Europe with 2 members being Italian and Spanish. Some of us can also speak English, Italian, Spanish or German! One of our members, Juliette Mandelbrojt, speaks Mandarin and realised an interview with Sing-Pei Yu from Taiwan (available in English on our Youtube channel) and another one of our members, Béatrice Urbah, is learning French Sign Language which was useful for the #StaySafeStayHome challenge and to raise awareness about the deaf/mute community. To do so, we shared one word every day for two weeks in French Sign Language related to our project’s theme on our social media.
Indeed it is important for us to make science accessible to everyone therefore we challenged ourselves to explain our project to various publics: we wrote an article in a scientific student journal detailing our project and using specific scientific terms and wrote a comic book that we made understandable by adults as well as children. We also organised an activity for kids at the Nature House in Paris, and participated in the Science Festival at the Science and Industry museum with the other Parisian teams. There we had the opportunity to discuss our project with the public which was very diverse with a broad range of knowledge about biology in general and water pollution. Indeed, this was the chance for us to present our project to a sample of the iGEM public that already knows the competition and its implications and thus this challenged us to really debate and analyze different parts of our project with them.
Another point that we care about is making everything we do accessible for all financial situations which was possible thanks to our sponsors and our crowdfunding pot. All the articles we wrote are accessible for free online as well as the comic book that we also printed and distributed to the children during the activity at the Nature House. Additionally, the tickets for the events we participated in were free.
In France, Public Education is free and laic. There are different kinds of grants and scholarships allowing students to live correctly while studying as well as exceptional help for particular conditions. This allows people with limited funds to have access to universities and thus to participate in the iGEM competition. We were careful about making our project and all our activities respectful of all religions and beliefs.