On pi day, while many students were relaxing, a group of girls and I were on our way to our first ever biology conference. Led by Ms. Hanna and Ms. Ortiz, we made our way through the confusing streets of the MIT campus, almost parking in a loading deck, and walking right past the place we needed to be, the MIT Welcome Center. The MIT Welcome Center is the place of the BioBuilders final assembly, where students from all over the world, such as Thailand and the UK, can share their ideas. Walking into the welcome center, the first thing our team saw was the big screen with all the abstracts by other teams, as well as a huge table filled with food and drinks. After a couple of minutes of connecting with people, eating, and planning who would go up to present our project, we all got called into the auditorium for the first part of the final assembly: the presentation of everyone’s projects. One of our teammates, Ruby Quintiliani, said that her favorite project was “the presentation on the plastic-eating coral, and how they used synthetic biology to genetically modify the coral.” Due to all the AMAZING ideas, the conference’s first part ran a little over time, which left us limited time to explore and ask questions about the other projects to deeper understand them. After a brief period to walk around and connect, we all regrouped at our own poster and waited for people to ask questions about our abstract. Our abstract was on peanut allergies, a very common allergy, affecting about 6 million people worldwide. We used the insight given by our mentor, Hia Ming, to find a detector for the peanut allergen before consumption. Some days after the final assembly the long awaited email came: the first steps to publishing our work in the Biotreks scientific journal!
By Tvesha Patel ‘27, Photography Editor
