iGEM kick-off Session

Program

15h00 - 15h30 'What is Synthetic Biology and how can we use it to promote sustainability?', Isabel Rocha (Principal Investigator, ITQB-NOVA)

15h30 - 16h10 'Introduction to the iGEM Competition - Pioneering Synthetic Biology', Nemanja Stijepovi (After iGEM coordinator)

16h10 - 16h30 'The Madrid /Spanish Journey in iGEM',  Fran Quero (leader of iGEM Team UCM Madrid in 2018 and 2019)

16h30-17h00 Drinks and snacks

17h00-18h00 'iGEM simulation'

Speakers' Bios

Isabel Rocha is Pro-rector for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at NOVA University. During 2007 she was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, as part of the MIT-Portugal Program, where she attended several courses in innovation and entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management. She is part of the MIT-Portugal faculty and was, from 2007 to 2017, in charge of a Portuguese educational program in innovation involving 4 universities and 2 PhD programs – the i-teams program. She was the President of P-Bio, the Portuguese Bioindustries Association and she is also one of the founders and scientific coordinator of two companies that won several national prizes in entrepreneurship and are involved in major industrial biotechnology projects worldwide – SilicoLife and Biotempo.

Isabel does her research at ITQB-NOVA and Minho University in Biotechnology covering the topics of Metabolic Engineering and Systems Biology and has published over 120 full papers in international journals, books and international conferences. She is the Principal Investigator of several projects and is involved in collaboration projects with research institutions worldwide.

Nemanja Stijepovic is the European Ambassador for the iGEM Foundation and coordinator of the Alumni program - After iGEM. With a background in Applied Biology, he participated in the competition for 2 years (2017, 2018) as a team leader, graphic designer, and event organizer for a team in Germany. As an ambassador, he worked on increasing visibility of iGEM and SynBio at events, recruiting new teams, and organizing the biggest European iGEM Conference in Bonn.

Now based in Paris, Nemanja continues to work for the iGEM Community at the Foundation's first international branch - iGEM Europe.

Fran Quero is a biologist and DIYbio enthusiast engaged in developing open biology communities. To do so Fran helped start the first open citizen biofablab of Madrid (Spain), and found and coordinated the first collegiate and High School iGEM teams of the city in 2018 and 2019. Now living in Shenzhen (China), Fran is a student of openFIESTA BIO3 program and the main assistant of Bio-X-Space, the bio-hacking laboratory of the faculty.'

If you'd like to know more, please contact sofiaferreira@itqb.unl.pt