Human Practices

The idea of creating the podcast came from an initial discussion within the group about effective ways to promote our project and connect it with society on a broader scale. In addition to the existing platforms (Instagram and YouTube), we realized that a podcast could amplify the dissemination of information in an accessible and engaging way. Thus, Synteticast was born. Our project is based on conducting interviews with experts in the fields of health, academia, and industry. Each interview was divided into three parts, allowing the thematic content of each episode to be structured in an organized and understandable manner. Additionally, short explanatory episodes will be created to address scientific terms discussed during the interviews. To start our channel, we chose the theme "Health Heroes", where we conducted interviews with scientists with disabilities in order to increase the visibility of these professionals' careers and encourage young people and children with disabilities to pursue such careers if they wish. For the first episode, we had the opportunity to interview Dr. Nuccia de Cicco, a scientist who shared her story about how her life changed when she was diagnosed with a tumor, which resulted in Bilateral Profound Deafness in 2007. Since then, Nuccia has been working as a coordinator, developing accessibility and education projects for the deaf in science, such as coordinating the Didactic Laboratory of Science for the Deaf (LaDiCS). 02. Entrevista - Nuccia de Cicco - Synteticast | Podcast on Spotify

In the second episode, we interviewed Professor Dr. José Otávio Pompeu, who was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. He shared with us a bit about his academic journey, the challenges he faced throughout his career, and the importance of the diagnosis for his profession.03. Entrevista - José Otávio - Synteticast | Podcast on Spotify

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To create the promotional video for our group, we first outlined our goals, which are to promote IGEM's activities to a less specialized audience, playfully working with the scientific concepts used in our scientific proposal. Additionally, aiming to connect with the current cinematic landscape and reduce the hostility that academic content can sometimes generate, we decided to make a parody of the movie Inside Out 2. In our story, we have a scientist trying to solve glycosylation problems of a protein in yeast and bacteria. At first, she struggles to resolve these issues and decides to rest her head on the lab bench to avoid feeling overwhelmed. While she rests, we take a journey inside her mind, where chaos reigns, until a new emotion appears: Scientific Thought. This new character calms everyone down and takes us to the Island of Science, where solutions to the problems the scientist encountered in her project are presented, which is our team's scientific proposal. With these new ideas, the scientist gets up excited and continues her experiments. With this script, we gathered the team, provided costumes for the emotions and other characters, thought of real-life settings that could compose our story, and filmed the scenes with lightness and fun. Finally, the raw footage was edited, and voilà, our promotional video is ready!

On September 19, 2024, we held a seminar at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo (IQ-USP) for the Center for Research in Biology and Bacteriophages (CEPID-B3). CEPID-B3 is composed of researchers funded by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation), whose research areas range from gene expression to synthetic biology. The main goal of our presentation was to showcase our project, receive feedback to improve our scientific activities, and build partnerships for future collaborations. Additionally, we highlighted how the IGEM USP BR team can collaborate with CEPID-B3, emphasizing the use of IGEM distribution kits, which offer a variety of valuable tools for studies in Molecular Biology and Microorganism Biochemistry.