FAQ

Yes! If there are enough graduates interested in participating we will make a separate division just for them. If not, we may add a disclaimer to the project letting people know that graduates participated. Any team that has equal or greater than half of their members as graduates may be considered a graduate team.

The Gogec virtual conference will take place in February 2023 with the required materials submitted in January 2023. Exact dates will be announced closer to the event.

Yes, the winning experimental team will receive and OT-2 robot from Opentrons and support. Other winning teams will receive recognition, though other prizes are planned at this time.

We are currently in the process of seeking sponsors to provide access to tools for participating teams. Because we are a new conference we don’t yet have any official sponsors, but we hope to have some in the near future! We also plan to have a page of reccomended free tools and resources for teams to use available soon.

No, we allow synthetic biologists of all ages to participate in Gogec. We may split people based on whether they have graduated undergraduate or not, depending on the number of teams that are participating. If the majority of a team has already graduated undergraduate then it may be considered a graduate level team, but they can still participate in the competition.

No, as long as your project is still a synthetic biology project that fulfills the requirements for the competition then you can change it as much as you wish until you submit your visual abstract, report, and video.

No, as long as there are at least 2 members there is no upper limit for team size as long as they are still considered one coherent team.

Fill out this form! https://tally.so/r/m6beom The conference is free to register for and attend, so if you fill out that form you are registered for the conference and you just need to submit the required materials and attend the event! Make sure to register by the deadline of Septermber 10th! Additionally, there are only 25 guaranteed spots for teams, so we reccomend you register sooner rather than later to make sure you get a spot.

If there aren't enough participating teams in each category to split into 4 tracks, then we will prioritize splitting experimental and computational to create 2 tracks.

Yes, if you believe you have a valid reason to be exempt from a certain requirement then contact us with the requirement you would like waived along with a description of why you believe it should be waived for you, then we will evaluate it and grant an exemption if it is necessary.

Yes, we are now allowing high school teams to register for Gogec starting with Gogec 2023! However, we do not have a separate division for high school teams, so a high school team will be competing primarily against undergraduates unless we have many high school teams register. Additionally, high school teams must register using the high school registration form, not the normal registration form. This form can be found here: https://tally.so/r/meqgBo

Our organizing team and the people assisting us consists of undergrads, PhD students, postdocs, and faculty from Mexico, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Uganda, and the USA who are linked by our desire to see synbio education and research being made more accessible.

We believe in making the results and presentations understandable to as many people as possible, therefore all submitted materials must be in English. We hope that this will allow all teams to discuss their projects with everyone else and facilitate as much inter-team discussion as possible.