jmicrobe

Microbial ecologist, bioinformatician, mad scientist

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science hack day portland part I

01 Jan 2017

Back in July of 2016 I joined up with some folks who were organizing the first Science Hack Day in Portland, Oregon. If you’re not familiar, Science Hack Day is a 24-hour (or sometimes weekend-long) event where people come together to make cool things with science. Cities worldwide have hosted their own Science Hack Days, all with the support of local volunteers and donors. One of the best things is that the event is free, and provides meals and supplies for the participants. Each city has it’s own flavor, but typically there’s a mix of scientists, hardware & software engineers, students, children, and other nerds.

I won’t spend much time talking about background stuff but let me tell you - organizing an event like this was incredibly fun for me. I met a lot of new people, and enjoyed the challenge of working with a team (of really great nerds!) to figure out all of the outreach, logistics, and fundraising that needed to be done. Leading up to the event we had two meet & greets, along with online introductions on our Slack channel - and our community started to self-assemble.

I’m not sure if I read this somewhere, or someone suggested it to me but around the time I was an undergrad my mantra became “Don’t think, just sign up for stuff and do it”. For a kid who grew up shy, this has worked out well for me. So naturally I volunteered to be the first speaker for the lightening talks that night. My job was to introduce everyone to Science Hack Day, how it would work, what to expect, and basically be the hype-person. I chose to channel my childhood inspiration: Ms. Frizzle.

Maybe this is just coming from someone in academia, but I would have loved a whole day of just talks from our guests. The event was conveniently nestled between the 2016 Open Hardware Summit and the Hack Oregon Donut Sunday Summit, so we were fortunate to have guests and speakers from those events in attendance. Dr. Jenny Molloy gave a really exciting talk about open science and science hardware. I learned a ton about open hardware from Drew Fustini. Dietrich Ayala got us all passionate about the open internet and Cat Nikolovski introduced us to Hack Oregon - an amazing nonprofit group building open data projects.

When the talks were over we turned on the music, set up our beer and kombucha bar, put snacks out and started to mingle. Alex Chally fired up the 3D printers he had brought, and Dr. Molloy got to work with his help to print a 3D microscope.

Thomas Hudson had the mood lighting covered after he set up the Internet of Buckets. He showed a group of folks how to program the bucket colors, which were conveniently capable of 23 hues - the same number of amino acids used by humans! Soon the Internet of Buckets was stealthily streaming the amino acid sequence for the protein known as p53 - an important player in cancer suppression.

I was most excited by the two kits we purchased from The Odin - a DIY CRISPR kit and a DIY fluorescent yeast kit. Working with another organizer (now Dr.!) Danielle Robinson I helped teach someone who’d never used a pipette before to perform a CRISPR transformation on e. coli!

As the night wound down, and the microbes were put to bed (atop of the 3D printer as a makeshift incubator), I pitched my tent and played camp counselor while about 5 or so others hunkered down for the night…and the rest I’ll continue in another post.

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