Our fourth and final interviewee from the gold medal winning iGEM team is Anna Beltrami, a third year Biomedical Sciences student. Here’s what she had to say.
Firstly, what was your role in the team and what were your main contributions to the project?
I did some lab work, but not as much the others did. I put myself in charge of the structure and organisation of the team, and then I initiated some collaboration with another team in Italy. One of the criteria for the gold medal was to show that you collaborated with another iGEM team, so there was this team in my home town, and we collaborated with them.
How would you describe the overall experience of competing in iGEM?
It was really exciting to be part of it as a whole. It’s kind of hard to explain the iGEM feeling but when you’re there and everyone’s so hyped about their project, it’s buzzing and you think wow look at everything we’ve done.
Your project for the competition was called ‘Envirowire’. How did the team come up with the idea?
Before we met with our supervisors, we had to come up with an idea. We all met in the library and were like, let’s look at something that’s important, because for the competition we had to perform a novel function that was useful. From that we thought about the environment, and then we actually looked at all sorts of major environmental problems.
We wanted to make renewable sources of energy, or a method of conducting energy. And then we spoke to our supervisors, one was working with amyloid, and another of our supervisors was involved with bacterial microbe fuels. So we started from quite far out looking at the environment, and then we closed in and ended up with the Envirowire.