[DIYbio] Hello from Great Lakes Biotech Academy

Been lurking on this message board for a little while now and want to get more involved.  

I started the Great Lakes Biotech Academy late last year in downtown Indianapolis.  The mission is to make biotechnology more accessible to young people and community members.  I'm doing this in addition to (and separate from) my day job as a scientist working in the agricultural biotech space.  My space downtown is about ~4000 square feet and I've done a ton of work getting things setup for basic biotech experiments.  I purchased equipment off of Amazon.com and I've also been trying to build pieces of equipment inspired by DIY posts.  The research area we will be focused on is filamentous fungi, specifically developing synthetic biology tools for Neurospora crassa (which I have a lot of experience with from graduate school).  

A key difference about my organization relative to most of the other community labs is that I also want to provide core skills training in biotech to young people in the 18-20 age range.  With the right mentoring, access to the key equipment, and a focus on practical skills training I think we can transform a motivated young person into a proficient genetic engineer in 6-12 months.   

Since I started partaking on this journey I've found that this space is still extremely complicated -- even for someone with extensive training.  Its crazy how much of the practice of molecular biology is not even minimally optimized for cost or time efficiency. I've been spending a lot of time and money trying to figure out the best way to approach a variety of topics and will contribute to the discussions here whenever I can.

-Will