Built With Biology ↗ Conference, formerly SynBioBeta, is an international event that gathers the leading community of innovators, investors, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, thought leaders, policy makers and academics in Synthetic Biology from all around the world. This year, the conference took place on April 12th - 14th (2022) and comprised over 1,900 attendees, celebrating the progress the bio-economy made through the pandemic and the strides toward industry's goal of making the planet a better place!
- Event Date: April 12th - 14th, 2022
- iGEM Representative: Cibele Zolnier - General Projects Officer, iGEM Community and Srishty Rathee, WiSTEM - iGEM EPIC
The iGEM Community had the opportunity to not only connect with the larger synthetic biology community but also, our team interacted with over 50 iGEMers who are either pursuing or are interested in pursuing entrepreneurial careers.
Cibele Zolnier, Coordinator and General Projects Officer, iGEM Community
“Attending BWB was an amazing experience! I was able to connect with and meet many enthusiastic people in synbio!! It was also incredible to have people approaching me to share that "they learned about synbio with iGEM" or that "they wished to have done iGEM in University". It was a really memorable event!”
As part of the official iGEM Delegation with Will Wright (iGEM HQ), Marjolein Crooijmans (iGEM EPIC) and Maria Clara Astofi (iGEM Design League), the team connected with organizations which share our goals and visions to keep supporting and building our community. These included :
- Connecting with the World Economic Forum for collaboration with the SynBio Alliance.
- Connecting with Global Open Source Hardware (GOSH) for collaboration opportunities with the iGEM Open Science and Accessibility (OScA) Network.
- Connecting with Opentrons on sharing experiences about community management and support.
- Connecting with the Race Against the Clock gathering for students and young biofounders.
From an organizing perspective, the event also provided insights on large scale event management. The overall organization of BWB was excellent and the biggest highlight was the Network-friendly environment where people had several places where they could meet.
The biggest learning was seeing how people are excited for in-person events after so long. The 3 days were a bit overwhelming as there were things happening from 9am - midnight but it was an amazing experience!
Srishty Rathee, WiSTEM and iGEM EPIC (now iGEM Startups)
“The whole synergy with SynBio and people working in it was a sign of motivation to go in this field and be proud to be part of iGEM.”
The Built with Biology Conference was well organized and featured a number of informative sessions - including talks from Eric Schmidt, Meghan J Palmer and Terri Shieh Newton. Moreover, the event also provided a great opportunity to see all the new firms with various technologies and achievements, which we missed seeing growing in the last 2 years.
iGEM organized the iGEM meetup on the 13th April. The same day we took our group pictures in front of the 'Built with Biology' event banner and I was lucky to win the closest number of iGEM Community members present.
Our team attended the networking events from Race Against the Clock (RATC) and got a chance to talk to other attendees, particularly students from different countries about what brings them to synthetic biology and the local landscape of the field in their country. A lot of female students were interested to hear about the WiSTEM initiative, the projects the team had undertaken for raising awareness about the representation of women and minorities in STEM and SynBio and their activities to both promote Women leaders in the field and inspire youth.
On April 14th, our cohort attended the talks and Q/A sessions, visited the startup booths to meet the people “building” with biology. Srishty also organized a panel discussion with Venture Creation Lab Alumni from iGEM EPIC to introduce attendees to the program and how it provided iGEMers the platforms to realize their ideas and build startups.
One interesting aspect about the conference was the dream board where attendees wrote about their goals and vision for the future. The event was partially organized by RATC and it was amazing to see their connection with iGEM and its community members.
To find more information about the iGEM Ambassadors & Promoters for North America and regional synbio activities visit our North America webpage. Learn more about the Ambassador Program here.
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