NYU Shanghai captures Silver at 2015 iGEM Giant Jamboree

Over the break, NYU Shanghai students clinched  the silver medal at the 12th annual iGEM Giant Jamboree in Boston. Dubbed by some as “the world cup of science”, this year's event attracted over 4,000 participants from 250 schools around the world to work on synthetic biology projects aimed at solving real-world challenges.

As part of the competition, student teams had access to a catalog of more than 20,000 standard biological parts to build genetically engineered machines, or GEMs (not to be confused with GMOs). The NYUSH Team's bacterial music synthesizer, SYNTH, earned them a Silver medal and a Best Poster nomination. The second part of the project was a virtual reality simulation of the bacterial cell and biology lab.

The NYU Shanghai silver medallists are Ann Yang, Christina Erwin, Zhang Zhan, Xiangci Li, Reida Akam, Han Su, Jinyu Zhu, Spencer Smith,  Rachel Leoff. Most of them are spending the year studying away in NYU's global network. Wenshu Li, Jungseog Kang, Bruno Kruse and David Fitch advised and supported NYU Shanghai's student innovators. 

Of all the 280 institutions registered at this year's event, 104 schools came from Asia, 72 from Europe, 20 from Latin America, 82 from North America and 2 from Africa. 

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