Team iTesla-SoundBio

Our Dream

We are a group of high school students from across Western Washington who wish to have a chance to participate in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition this year. iGEM started in 2004 and is now the premiere student synthetic biology competition in the world, opening its doors to high school students in 2011. The program challenges us to use one of the fastest growing fields today, synthetic biology, to design and execute novel research projects to solve real-world problems.

Through this multidisciplinary science, we will harness the power of living systems, modifying small organisms like yeast and bacteria to perform tasks that can improve nearly every area of life, including agriculture, medicine, and the environment.  

iGEM World Championship, photo credit: Justin Knight

As the first high school team in Washington, we will represent our state in the high school division of the iGEM World Championship Jamboree held in Boston, Massachusetts every year.  Here, we will compete and present our research alongside high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from all over the globe.

For more information about iGEM, visit www.igem.org.

We have also partnered with University of Washington’s award-winning team to help make this a reality.  They have directed us as mentors and advisers!

Our dedicated mentors @ UW iGEM :)

Our Roots

Our team consists of 36 high school students with richly diverse backgrounds. As advocates for the Women in STEM movement, our leadership team has a 1:1 gender ratio and over half our team is made up of women as depicted in the pie chart below.

As the only high school iGEM team in Washington, we made it our responsibility to expand this opportunity to as many Washington schools we could. The result: we’ve reached students from Bellevue to as far as Olympia, with members coming from an increasingly growing number of schools.  

The above chart displays results of  27/36 total members.  

Lastly, we represent all four grades of high school. This includes 9th & 10th grade students, for whom hands-on research opportunities are almost impossible to find.  

However, opportunities open to any grade level tend to be very selective. Our policy is to welcome any high school student with a scientific passion into our team, opening access to one of the most significant fields of our century.  

Despite the fact that we come from different places or speak different tongues, we all share a passion for synthetic biology and are enthusiastic about the implications it has for the future of our society.

Our Promise

By launching the first high school iGEM team in Washington, we have provided open access to unprecedented research opportunities for high school students in Washington, but in order to continue through our first year, we need your help!  We need to stock our lab with supplies, equipment, and other reagents to begin lab training, as well as pay the iGEM registration fee to register our team.  

If you're interested in supporting educational opportunities, novel synthetic biology research, or our enthusiastic team members, we would love it if you would donate to this campaign! For more information about our team, or to propose other forms of donation (equipment, software etc…) please email [email protected].

Below is how we will use your donations!

Thank you for your support!

Our Sponsors