Speaker 1: Hello everyone, my name is Divya and on behalf of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, I would like to welcome you all to IGEM 2022 and while you think about your very exciting synthetic biology project, our committee would like to encourage you to also think about some other aspects like how to build a team that is mindful of including members of a diverse background and how to build a project in a way that is mindful of the impact that it can have on diverse communities on a local as well as a global level. So today with the committee I would like to present to you some of the guidelines. These are not like hard and fast rules, but more like just tips or guidelines for you to follow in order to make a more diverse and inclusive team, as well as a diverse and inclusive project. So we've divided the whole presentation into two. So for the first part, oh, Alan, you'll have to move. So how to build a diverse and inclusive team for this, our first recommendation is to actually reach out to underrepresented groups. So think about the composition of your team. So think about what kind of people make up your team and can you actively reach out to like look around you and can you actively reach around out to people who are often underrepresented in the scientific community. Can you include them in your team. And this is because diverse teams are often successful teams. Actually, we have Argent stats as well, like statistics from the previous years, which shows that more diverse teams have very often won more awards. So there is an added incentive for you to work on. That would be our first tip. And the second one would be, okay, the second thing we would like you to think about is how are the tasks, roles, and responsibilities within your team distributed? So are they equal in the sense like reflect and think about things like are most of the female members of your team involved in tasks related to human practices? Or are most of the male members involved in the software development, for example. So this is something we often observe, like over the years when we have looked at the statistics, we often observe that male members are involved in software development, or the female members are often involved in human practices. So these are things that we would like you to think and reflect about while assigning tasks and distributing roles and responsibilities within your team. And for the next, I would, yeah, move on to Hina, who would give you some more tips.

Speaker 2: Hi, everyone. Welcome to iGEM. I'm going to jump straight into the next point. So the next guideline for creating an inclusive culture that allows diversity to thrive is to create a judgment-free space in which everyone's voice is heard, where no one is hesitant to share their ideas and thoughts. And secondly, also to be mindful of acknowledging any contribution, however big or small, made by any team member. Both of these things will contribute to a positive environment where all your team members will be able to follow their own interests, gain new skills, contribute to their fullest potential, and overall have a great iGEM experience. Next slide, please. And lastly, what I want to comment on is that when you're considering under-representation of some groups in your team, the first thing to do is ask why, and then to make reasonable adjustments to remove those barriers. So for example, if you want to encourage participation of more women in your team. Few examples that come to mind are provide flexible working hours, provide daycare opportunities or lactation rooms. Another great example is think about whether there are gender neutral bathrooms at the location that you're having your next team event. Or a very good one is how to make your lab space more wheelchair accessible. Anyway, these are a lot of things to think about. And thankfully, you do not have to do this alone. We're here to help you. I'm now gonna pass this on to Alan and Asil who will talk about how to create a inclusive and diverse project.

Speaker 3: Hi. So I'll just carry on. Thanks, Sina and Divya, hi. So how to build a diverse and inclusive project. So first I'll talk through some guidelines, but remember this isn't a tick box exercise. Some general things to be mindful of are to use inclusive language, so for example, being inclusive of different genders and when you talk about different marginalised groups, finding out how they prefer to be referred to, and also being mindful of pronouns. Also sharing your work in an accessible way. So not assuming that things are, just because they're accessible to you, they'll be accessible to everyone. And so this can, so some teams have done work on making their wikis more accessible and making some of the equipment they make more accessible as well. And so also you can take care of demographic representations and when designing surveys and carrying out survey-based research. And another thing is to be, to think about the impact of projects on local communities and especially with iGEM being about local people solving local problems, but one of the things in iGEM. But yeah, so these are just things to get started, but it's not a tick box exercise. So I'll move on to the next slide. And the main thing I would say is whatever you do to make sure to include groups at all, to include everyone, to have especially underrepresented groups, or if your project is aimed at a particular group or a particular marginalised community, at all stages of the project. So there's quite a popular saying, nothing about us without us, which came about through, I think it was made popular through disability rights campaigning, but it's also being used for race, ethnicity, and lots of different, lots of different groups. And yeah, so I think the main thing is to make sure that there's no default, to remember that there's no default experience in how your project will be perceived, consumed, desired, or understood. So there's no one size fits all, like in this diagram, and to do that at every step of the project, from design to the end. So a bit like integrated human practices, the same idea of anticipating differences in experience, reaching out, listening to people, and then troubleshooting and adapting your project, but making sure that you include the voices of different people at every stage and that you listen. I'll hand it over to Alan now.

Speaker 4: Thank you. So I think we'll just close by giving a couple of examples of some teams that have really stood out in these efforts. So I know that maybe what we have been saying it can all be very broad and you might be thinking oh how, how can we sort of apply this to both our project and as we're thinking about forming our team, or moving along and forming our team so we thought we'd highlight some examples of recent winners of the Inclusivity Award. So this is an initiative that iGEM started just in 2020 to recognize teams that have made exceptional efforts to include people with diverse identities in scientific research in a broad sense. So the first example we want to highlight is that of Rochester 2020. So they won the Inclusivity Award for the undergraduate division. Their project aimed to tackle language barriers within iGEM, so they communicated their social media posts in 10 languages and also implemented American Sign Language within their videos. Within their media, they also provided alternative text and captions, and this was all sort of geared to promote awareness of endometriosis, which was what their project was aimed at. And they also aimed to facilitate the integration of American Sign Language vocabulary and synthetic biology, but they also designed their wet lab and hardware approaches to be more accessible to low resource areas by adapting their diagnostic and different hardware designs to be inexpensive and simple to use. So as a second example, we're highlighting PYMS China who won the inclusivity award again in 2020 for the high school division. Part of their initiatives included making a podcast series called Boss Women in STEM, in which they highlighted women leaders in science and then highlighted their paths to success. And lastly, the winner in the undergrad division for 2021 was Team Bolivia. So one of the things they did, similar to Rochester in 2020, was recognizing barriers to access to science in general in their community. So what they did was they also provided communications of their science in three indigenous languages of Peru, Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani. And they also, more importantly, aside from the communication aspect, they designed hardware to make their synthetic biology application accessible and deployable within the context that they're living in. So what we really get excited about and what we encourage you to think about is, of course, how can we improve access to our science via communication as many of these teams did, but also how can the science itself, from the project design to the protocols that you might be using, be made more accessible and inclusive. So there's many, many more examples of iGEM teams doing excellent work, which we didn't have room to highlight, but I encourage you to look at the iGEM Diversity and Inclusion Hub for some more inspiration on that. We also very much encourage you to reach out directly to us. We work closely with teams throughout the year on accessibility and on their D&I initiatives, as well as on designing surveys and handling potentially sensitive information. And this year we're very excited to have the Jamboree back in person. We're organizing meetups, activities, and workshops So please stay tuned for for information on that and reach out if you have any questions so I think with that we'll we'll open it up to some questions.

Speaker 5: Great. Thanks, everyone. So we've got a question in the chat here. Um, is diversity inclusion, also what makes integrated human practices different from human practices.

Speaker 1: I can take that one. Actually, in a sense, yes. But in the very broad aspect, I would say, of course, you should think about diversity and inclusion just as integrated human practices in every aspect of your project and your team from the get-go, from the time you start your first task until you finish. Your whole journey should like integrated human practices. They really encourage you to include this throughout your journey, and that's what we want to do as well. But it's still separate in the sense that it is not diversity and inclusivity. So it's not specific to your project. In the sense you should think of this in a more holistic manner. So it's not like the human practices is quite targeted at your project itself in the sense of how does that impact the local global community as such, but the diversity and inclusivity, it goes beyond. So I think with diversity, you have to think a little bit outside of your project itself.

Speaker 5: Fantastic answer. Thank you very much, Divya. And then we have one quick question. Does the translation have to be from team participants in videos? So if they want to do translation in different languages, how can teams go about doing that?

Speaker 1: Not necessarily. It could be a lot of work to translate the entire video. You could just have closed captions, for example. You could have captions where you, like in YouTube videos, you just choose the language, and then people could have captions in different languages. This could be an easier way out if you want to do it in multiple languages. But of course, we welcome teams who are able to have the entire video in multiple languages. This would be great. Especially think of this in a more local context as well. If you are in a country, for example, India, where you have 22 official languages, you can consider having them in multiple languages, or at least having the text in multiple languages to reach out to a broader audience, for example.

Speaker 5: Fantastic, thank you very much. So we are at time, so thank you very much for the Diversity Inclusion Committee members for joining us. We are going to pass this over to Vasileky to talk about entrepreneurship and EPIC.