Every individual, regardless of background or experience, should have an equal opportunity to engage with scientific knowledge and technological development.
The Inclusivity Award recognizes exceptional efforts to include people with diverse identities in scientific research. Who is allowed to have a voice in iGEM, synthetic biology and science more broadly? How have you developed new opportunities to eliminate barriers and allow more people to contribute to, participate in and/or be represented by these communities? To compete for this prize, activities do not have to be directly related to your team’s project. Document your approach, how you improved inclusivity and what was learned.
Visit the Special Prizes page for more information.
We should all recognize the importance of building an open and welcoming scientific community. A more diverse community involved in creating knowledge and technology is more likely to produce a more equitable and representative system. Every individual, regardless of background or experience, should have an equal opportunity to engage with scientific knowledge and technological development. Everyone should be able to share their opinions on the societal implications of research.
The section below is a separate, independently-written draft, produced by a team member outside the main documentation process. Kept here for reference and comparison; not yet fact-checked by team leadership. One demographic claim from the original draft has been removed pending verification directly with the individual concerned — see note below.
Framed as an attempt to avoid the boilerplate that inclusivity sections of iGEM wikis often slip into — who is on the team, who isn't, where outreach was tried, and where it fell short.
Fourteen students, six countries of origin, three continents currently resident, ages 16–21. Three are first-generation in their family to attend any post-secondary program. [A claim about team gender composition appeared in the original draft here; it has been removed pending direct verification with the individual it concerned, since gender identity is not something to publish without confirmed consent — see the team's note on this elsewhere.] One member is a fluent ASL signer; one is colour-blind; one has ADHD and has written about it on the team blog.
An explicit admission: nobody from the Global South who isn't already in a privileged-enough position to access the program's existing selection process, with a stated intention to address this via need-based bursaries for the next cohort, described plainly as "not solved."
ASL-interpreted lab tours in partnership with a local deaf students' association; workshop materials in three languages (Mandarin, English, Spanish), translated by team members and proof-read by outside native speakers; colour-coded figures designed with shape/pattern differentiation, not just hue, to remain legible for colour-vision differences.
A specific, named failure: an early version of a workshop used "host" and "victim" language to describe genetic transformation, until a deaf student pointed out via interpreter that the language imported an unnecessary hierarchy. The workshop was rewritten. Framed as a lesson about not always noticing the language used until someone points it out — and an explicit rejection of "diversity theatre," i.e. inflating numbers for the sake of a rubric.
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