iGEM at Berkeley
SCIENCES - RESEARCH - TECHNOLOGY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Our mission is to provide undergraduates the unique opportunity to perform original, student-led genetic engineering research projects. We seek to increase accessibility of the synthetic biology community to students at Cal.
About us:iGEM at Berkeley is a “by students for students” synthetic biology lab space. Over time, students can receive hands-on and virtual training to fully participate in experimentation in either our wetlab, or compbio team. These students can then take on leadership roles as officers who both manage experimentation and provide the members with a well-maintained hackerspace through various critical administrative roles. Progression through the club is based on contribution and not on previous experiences. All majors and years are welcome.
Recruitment for the Fall semester has officially started!
Our last infosession is Thursday, 8/31 from 8-9 pm in Dwinelle 179.
General Membership form: fill out this brief form if you're interested in being a general member, training team member, or outreach team member. As a general member, you get access to all of our training resources and professional development events, with the flexibility of completing everything on your own schedule. As a training team member, you can get a more guided introduction to synthetic and computational biology in a group-learning setting. No previous biology research experience is required or expected.
Application Forms: check out our applications if you're interested in joining one of our computational or wetlab experimental teams, ideation teams, DeCals, or admin teams. As an experimental team member, you will join a specific project and design experiments to research a specific question. We have 7 experimental teams that are recruiting this semester and 2 ideation teams. A brief description of each project is listed in the form, but come to one of our infosessions to learn about each project in more depth.
Students in an experimental project team (Wetlab or CompBio) will:
Design, implement, and analyze wet and computational projects with an application to synthetic biology. This will develop their problem solving abilities by trouble-shooting research projects, and push them to think creatively to design new experiments and protocols and adapt them to evolving data and feedback.
Learn genetic engineering techniques, and via project brainstorming sessions, become literate in analysis of scientific publications. Students will be pushed to read primary literature and evaluate the contemporary problems of their research topics, in order to produce plausible solutions in the form of project ideas. Via training modules, students will also receive hands-on skills to enter the wetlab space and to perform data analysis with computational tools.
Develop their abilities to communicate and accomplish goals with their peers. Our students will gain a sense of ownership of their research project, and play important roles in running and maintaining a simple BSL-1 lab space. Our effort is entirely student driven, and it will take a diverse set of students of different interests and backgrounds to keep our hacker-space thriving.
All information about our club including all of our applications can be found on igem.berkeley.edu.