Diversity and Inclusion

We, the Radboud iGEM team, believe that science and research are done best when it is shaped by diverse voices. We see that a research team which has members with diverse scientific backgrounds can tackle challenges more easily than research teams containing members of only a singular background. Therefore, the Radboud iGEM team found it of the utmost importance to reach out to people with all kinds of backgrounds during our recruitment. Since this is the first time that a team from Radboud University has taken part in iGEM, we wanted to ensure a future for iGEM within our university by sharing our enthusiasm with lower-year students and giving them the opportunity to get involved in iGEM next year.

During our team recruitment phase, our team representatives visited and presented our project to over 20 classes across a wide range of scientific disciplines within our university. This ensured that we reached students from diverse academic backgrounds and that we gave a lot of students an opportunity to join our team. We wanted to create a diverse team with a good amount of members, hence this strategy. Eventually, we ended up with a team of eight people from four different fields of science. These fields are molecular life sciences, chemistry, biology and computing science. This scientific diversity made it possible for our team to navigate through difficult obstacles, come up with an interesting project and perform experiments to create our final product.

An added bonus to our team’s scientific diversity is that we also managed to have seven nationalities within our eight-person team. This allowed our team members to learn more about different cultures. Outside of it being interesting to take a look into someone else's culture, we find these cultural exchanges/insights very important in a young scientist’s development since science is done worldwide.

As the first team representing Radboud University in the iGEM competition, we set a goal to ensure that the university continues to participate in future years, with the purpose of getting more people involved in the competition/science. We have done this by giving a presentation to the then-first-year students (see picture below), we explained to them what the iGEM competition is, our own experiences and how they could start their own team for next year. We also discussed things we found difficult and how they could avoid these things next year. When the presentation was done we spoke to students that were interested and gave them extra tips on how to start a team.

Another way we try to establish the iGEM competition in our university is to give our primary PI, Dr. Luc-Jan Laarhoven, a report on how we experienced the project, our struggles and how we think that the competition could be added to the curriculum of many bachelor/master degrees. He can then discuss the addition of the competition to the curriculums with the board in the hope of setting the competition in stone within our university. By adding the competition to the curriculum as a choosable course, we expect more people to consider joining the competition thus making the competition and science in general more accessible.

We do not only want to encourage our university to participate in the iGEM competition. We think that all students from all universities worldwide should have a chance to participate in this competition. That’s why we made a manual which describes how any student from any university can set up a project with the end goal of joining the iGEM competition. This manual will give useful information like how to set up your own team, how to get sponsors and more. We hope that with this manual we can give students from all over the world the opportunity to start their own scientific projects just like we did.

We hope that with our efforts we have made the next generation of students from our university enthusiastic about joining the competition and that we have given the opportunity to students worldwide to start their own projects. We also hope that the competition can become part of our university’s curriculum. We, the team members, would be more than happy to help new teams in their iGEM journey by giving them advice and tips on certain topics and mentoring them in general. The future of Radboud’s participation in the competition looks bright, and we hope to see new teams from our university and other new universities on the Jamboree in the coming years.