We recently caught up with four students from the School of Biosciences who were involved in last year’s gold medal winning iGEM team. Our first interviewee in the series is third year Biomedical Sciences student Katarina Pisani, who shared with us the most important things that she learnt whilst working on their project.
Firstly, what was your role in the team and what were your main contributions to the project?
I worked mainly in the wet lab of the laboratory, where I was mostly working on PCR, growing cells and doing the transformations. I was doing a bit of everything in the lab really.
How would you describe the overall experience of competing in iGEM?
I really enjoyed the fact that we were able to come up with our own idea for the project and then work on it and be proud of what we did. It was stimulating, but only in a positive way.
What were the most important things that you learned whilst working on the project?
For the scientific part of it, it was really important to do a lot of your own research and to really go as deep as you could. During the first and second year of my studies we were given topics that we had to learn, but with a project like this you have to find out everything that is related to it. Our supervisor said that when we were doing the project we were the most specialised people in that field. So for me the reasons for doing it and the depth of the research were quite new.
I think for me the most important lesson I learnt was what research was all about. Before that I knew that I wanted to do research but I didn’t know what I wanted to research, or what it was really about. From this project I realised that it’s what I’m interested in.