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0Title:
SynBio Challenges: A platform to foster the future generations of synthetic biologists
Astract:
Synthetic biology is an emerging field at the crossroads of biology, informatics and engineering with broad impacts and implications on society. As its frontiers are pushing rapidly into the future, and the resulting knowledge is exploding, training future generations of synthetic biologists becomes increasingly challenging. SynBio Challenges takes on this problem by providing a platform where university students, both undergrad and postgraduate, compete on various tracks, each designed to align with a frontier of synthetic biology. Rules of the competition are set up to encourage students to explore and create. With experience of previous three years in mainland China, now SynBio Challenges is ready for the world.
Personal Profile:
Xiao earned his PhD degree from University of Minnesota Twin Cities in the laboratory of Dr. Antony Dean, received training in theories of population genetics and ecology, and invented tools in synthetic biology. Now he is working on Synthetic Evolution that is to leverage technologies of synthetic biology to evolve genes or cells under extreme conditions in laboratory to discover phenotypes unseen in nature. Examples include phage mutants that are evolved to infect new host strains of pathogenic bacteria as a potential measure to fight superbugs.
