About
Over the past 17 years, there have been close to 3,000 teams that have participated in the iGEM competition. And invariably, these teams have proved to both the judges, and the world, that iGEMers are great at building things! The iGEM Competition, and by extension the entire iGEM community, is amazing at the design-build-test cycle. iGEM teams around the world generate hundreds of prototypes of solutions to both local and global problems that have the potential to change the world. Every year a small fraction of these projects continue, either in an academic setting or as a start-up.
The overarching goal of the Phoenix Project is to increase the number of projects that live on beyond their initial iGEM cycle. In this way, we hope that the iGEM community can move forward in making engineering progress on these pressing issues by iterating on each other’s ideas.
One way we hope to accomplish our goal is by making iGEM data more searchable. After all, you cannot build off of a project you cannot find! On this webpage, you will find a beta-version of a database we are building that is more searchable and approachable. If you are starting anew, we encourage you to take some time to explore the database and learn from the iGEMers that came before you. If you have already selected a project for this year, try to find teams that had similar goals and pick up from where they left off. And finally even if you are in the midst of tackling the problem you have chosen as part of your iGEM journey this year, Phoenix can help you easily find lab notebooks, methodologies and experimental approaches taken by previous iGEM teams that used the same chassis organism or tackled the same problem as you. With 16 years worth of iGEM team's wisdom behind you, you will be able to take your project even farther.
We hope to engage the whole iGEM community by recruiting a team of alumni who are passionate to help build a sustainable platform. Together, we will create a system to collect stories and insights from alumni about past projects, and in doing so create new knowledge about what iGEM teams have already accomplished. Importantly, once we have cleaned data from the past, current teams can capture important information in a standardized and searchable format. Together, we will build a database- sustainable for years to come.
Program Goals
Engineering
Easily searchable iGEM data makes it easier to find past teams that worked on projects similar to yours or to be inspired to pick up where another project left off. We hope to help all teams that want to continue the work of a previous team by connecting teams to the alumni that were on that team, if possible. When we build off of each other’s work, we make engineering progress and get these products closer to being ready to enter the world.
Stories
We want to answer- what happened to iGEMers and their projects? - to tell stories about the incredible journey the iGEM community has been all these years. As we try understanding how teams have evolved over time, we can begin to understand how iGEM has been laying the foundations for the field of Synthetic Biology. We want to hear how iGEM impacted you, and how your project or your experience lived on, in big ways and small. Every iGEMer’s story is an important piece of the iGEM story.
Data
Every year iGEM teams generate tremendous amount of data. Some of it is captured in a structured way, such as awards won by the team, and others captured in ways such as, a blog post about lessons a team learned in their iGEM journey, and some data remains uncaptured. We aim to make structured iGEM data readily available and easily searchable for teams. We also aim to incorporate more data, that is currently unstructured, over time. We hope to leverage the power of the iGEM community to help fill in the gaps by creating opportunities to add to our database. Finally, we aim to understand what data matters more to the iGEM community.
Tool
Below are the team lists from 2004-2020, with team information, locations, abstracts and medals they won. You may use the filter button in the top bar to filter the data to only show teams from your country, or track, or both. You can also group and sort the data using those metrics that are important to you! Use the search button to look up keywords from your project and see if iGEM teams have used them in the past.
This data is made available through Airtable, an online, collaborative platform for sharing and easily sorting data. For more information about Airtable and how to use it, check out this useful Airtable tutorial. This is a first version database and we would love to hear your feedback. Fill in this to share your thoughts and ideas. If you are interested in building off the work of one of these teams, please reach out to and we would love to try and help connect you!
Project Updates
Do you have an update to your project? Did it turn into a company? A research project?
We would love to hear about it! Fill in this form, or sign up for a 30 minute interview with our team.
Coming Soon to Phoenix Project
- Contact previous teams!
- Find out what happened to projects after the competition
- Track how projects have evolved over time
- A new user interface for the database
People
Currently, the Phoenix Project is being run by Ronit Langer, a data scientist and the former After iGEM Ambassador Coordinator from 2020. Ronit is excited to bring her data skills and her passion for connecting and supporting iGEMers to help make the Phoenix Project a success.
Also on the team are Ali Faraj, who is also a member of iGEM EPIC, Shrestha Rath, who is also the Asian Ambassador Coordinator, Tim Ho, who is also an Ambassador for North America, and Frederik de Wijs. Each member of the teams brings a variety of skills across data, communications, alumni engagement and user interface development. They are all excited to make Phoenix an amazing resource for the iGEM community!
If you want to get involved, please send an email to Ronit saying why you're interested and what relevant skills you have to the project (just passion is ok too!). Formal applications for the team will open soon, but if you want to get involved now, reach out.
If you want to get involved, please send an email to Ronit saying why you're interested and what relevant skills you have to the project (just passion is ok too!). Formal applications for the team will open soon, but if you want to get involved now, reach out.
Collaboration
We are not the first group to explore the world of iGEM data. Take a look at the iGEM Insights page to learn how their group is using is using histotical iGEM data to study the science of science, which uses large data sets to understand the mechanisms underlying the practice of science and engineering -- from what problems people chose to work on, to the trajectories of the field and the careers of the people within it.
You can also take a look at what teams have been able to build using iGEM data, such as the iGEM Matchmaker project from the 2015 NTU Trondheim team. The iGEM Matchmaker used keyword analysis to help match teams with similar projects in order to ease collaboration. Although this project is not currently being maintained, it is an excellent example of what iGEM teams can do!
If you have an idea about how to use iGEM's data, please reach out to phoenix@igem.org and we would love to try and help.