This is our first year as an iGEM team. As a new team, we wanted to ensure we started with a culture of inclusion, diversity, and accessibility. The reason we valued diversity and inclusion in our team is because we believe that the best science is the kind that represents and elicits many ideas from a variety of different backgrounds. One of the ways we accomplished this was through community engagement - hosting and presenting at events and talking to students (including students of color and girls). These efforts were particularly effective methods of attracting new team members.
However, we didn’t stop at Khan Lab School. Currently, we’re the only active high school team in the Bay Area. This meant that other high schoolers near us interested in iGEM would be forced to create their own team. When Proof School student Alyssa Tang reached out asking about joining the Khan Lab School team, we realized we didn’t have to restrict our team to our school. Now, we have students from schools all across the Bay Area, including Khan Lab School, Gunn, Castilleja, and Proof.
Our team is majority female (62%) and people of color (89%).
iGEM is a college and high-school-level competition and often requires a significant amount of synthetic biology knowledge. This sometimes makes it difficult for students new to the field to participate.
We noticed this at our school when we started the iGEM team and made an accelerated class to teach students the basics of synthetic biology over the course of 10 weeks. The class allowed rising ninth graders to get enough knowledge in biology to perform research for iGEM.
You can learn more about the class on the Education page.
We also educated elementary school students (K to 6th grade) about our project and they got a head start in learning about biology, bacteria, and the infinite possibilities they represent in making our world a better and more liveable place.
Although many people in Khan Lab School are science-inclined, KLS doesn’t have an actual lab. Because of this, the iGEM team was forced to look beyond our school - and indeed, city - to find a place to run experiments. When we found Counter Culture Labs (CCL), however, we knew we wanted to work there. Although it was not close to our school (More than an hour away), its purpose was similar to ours: “to demystify and democratize biotechnology by putting tools in the hands of those who want to explore, innovate and learn to advance scientific literacy.”[1] This is echoed even in CCL’s location: an underserved area of Oakland, in a community center by a grassroots collective.[2]
This wasn’t the only way we expanded scientific accessibility. In 2023, Ansh created and refined a working prototype of a homemade thermocycler and centrifuge, which are detailed further in contribution and hardware. Prior to having access to Counter Culture, we worked with such rudimentary tools and workspaces. Although we eventually moved to CCL, that experience reminded us of the importance of access to lab equipment and supplies for synthetic biology, and science more broadly, something we strive to cultivate in the future.
1 https://www.counterculturelabs.org/about.html
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The repository used to create this website is available at gitlab.igem.org/2024/khanlabschool.