New Materials, Nanotoothpaste, and Electric Bacteria: Outcomes of Eighth SCAMT Workshop Week

This year, over 360 students applied for the school, 45 of them made it through all the stages of selection, and 39 came to St. Petersburg to attend it. Applicants from different universities formed teams and chose a project to work on during the school. Among the options were: creating an eco-friendly dissolvent or hybrid materials made from spider web, developing a program for genomic bioinformatics, learning how to do 3D printing, studying the genome of a species, or working on tasks related to oncology. All projects were supported by the school’s sponsors – MerckFazerUMightDia-M, and Komus.

“We decided to hold the school offline because in-person communication is one of its crucial aspects. During the week, our students spent a lot of time working with equipment, contributed to team projects, and visited joint lectures, for example, on AI in nanotechnologies or personal brands in science. This year, we offered a couple of new options for project activities, such as creating a nanotoothpaste and studying “smuggler” bacteria, and also added an extra day for team building and playing games so that the participants would be able to hang out with all their fellow students, not only their teammates, and learn more about other projects of the school,” says Polina Khapaeva, director for development at the ChemBio cluster.

  

ITMO.NEWS asked the participants to discuss their impressions of the school and the projects they worked on.

Albina Murashko

Third-year student at the Faculty of Materials Science, Lomonosov Moscow State University