iGEM Foundation, Community Labs Track
Currently Chair of the Community Labs Track at the iGEM Foundation, the international body governing the largest synthetic-biology student competition.
What it is. I chair the Community Labs Track at the iGEM Foundation, the international body governing the largest synthetic-biology student competition and the major institutional anchor for community-bio practice worldwide. The Track is the iGEM-side home for non-institutional and community-based synthetic-biology work, run in coordination with the Global Community Bio Summit network.
The problem behind it. Community-bio labs around the world had spent the 2010s building infrastructure piecemeal — paying for equipment, navigating local biosafety review, training newcomers, hosting iGEM teams — without a stable institutional partner who would advocate for the lane inside the larger synthetic-biology field. iGEM’s leadership needed someone with a foot in both the community-lab world and the formal-institution world to chair the Track and steward the relationship.
What I do. The chairing role is light-touch on the technical side and heavier on the institutional one. Standards conversations. Safety guidance. Surfacing community-lab work to the iGEM main competition. Connecting newcomers who want to start a community lab to the people who have already built one. Most of it is glue-work. Some of it is policy work.
Collaborators
- iGEM Foundation — institutional home; international body for the synthetic-biology student competition
- Global community-bio organizers via the Global Community Bio Summit network
Press and references
Related projects
- 2010–2014
LA Biohackers
Co-founded a non-institutional community group with the goal of an open community biolab in Los Angeles. Active 2010–2014, alongside fellowship and lectureship at the UCLA Art|Sci Center.
- 2013–2017
BioDesign Studio
$5M permanent exhibition on synthetic biology, with a working biological design lab on the museum floor, tangible-tabletop microbe simulators, live cell-culture stations, and visitor-runnable design tools.