Cornell international Genetically ENgineered Machines
iGEM Engineering Project Team (Spring 2015 - Fall 2017)
What is iGEM?
For the last two and a half years, I have been lucky enough to be part of Cornell’s International Genetically Engineered Machines Project team. This is a team entirely run and organized by 25 undergraduates like myself, and we are among over 300 international university teams from all over the world. Each competition season we pick a local and/or global problem that we think we can solve in a novel way using synthetic biology - it’s completely open ended. We spend the spring semester researching and proposing dozens of problems, ideas, and solutions, taking into account relevance, impact, and feasibility. And it can be anything - health, environmental, manufacturing, even food products.
But it’s not just a synthetic biology solution. There are all sorts of other components to the project that we add to create as holistic and applicable a solution as possible, including hardware, devices, apps, outreach, business plan and project website. We spend the entire summer then formulating, creating, and testing our solution to bring to competition in the fall.
In 2016 (Legendairy) I was the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Product Development Lead, and in 2015 (fishPHarm) I was a Wetlab Engineer, Competition Presenter, and lead 3D digital modeler and animator.
Awards
In the two seasons I was on the team, we won a silver medal, a gold medal, Best Environmental Project, Best Supporting Entrepreneurship, Best Applied Design, and were nominated for Best Integrated Human Practices among over 300 other university teams.
In September 2017 I was awarded the P&G Technical Excellence Award for a presentation on my work as the 2016 CS/ECE Product Development Lead.
In April 2018 I won First Place at the Cornell Big Idea Competition for a five minute pitch on that same project (Legendairy).
