Edward Perello
A growing community of software developers and designers is becoming increasingly inspired by and eager to get involved in biology. Though participating in the “next digital revolution” is attractive, lateral entrants to the field face a steep learning curve before they can effectively discuss many core concepts of biological engineering with professional synthetic biologists.
We propose a project that builds and makes freely available a body of knowledge to encourage bioliteracy among emerging biocoders, biodesigners, and other professionals, alongside a longer-term effort to create an institute that trains lateral entrants on synthetic biology, its many technical disciplines, and related socioeconomic ethics and policy issues. We believe that this initiative will help bring more stakeholders into the emerging bioeconomy, encourage effective autonomous learning, foster new commercial and social collaborations, and ultimately shape the development of the synthetic biology field in a fair and open manner.
A growing number of software developers and designers are becoming increasingly inspired and eager to work in biology. However, lateral entrants to the field face a steep learning curve to climb before they can have effective discussions with professional biologists. This Ccatalyst Ggrant will help to develop the training resources on SynBio.info that encourage bio-literacy among a diverse range of stakeholders. These resources will also be used to create a formal organization that can solicit and received support from individual contributors and partner organizations that share our passion to bridge the gap between tech and biotech and expand the bio-economy.