From 2007.igem.org

Arnau Montagud

so... here again...

I graduated last June from my Biology studies at the University of Valencia, Spain. That's three months before last year´s Jamboree. My background is mainly on Cellular Biology, Molecular Biology and Genetics.

One year has passed, many things have occured in my life (strange days are these, as John Lennon sang) and I found myself here again filling this white sheet of paper...

If you want to learn about last year's Arnau, you better take a look here 'cause I would like to do something different now... different on the terms, and different on how to reach those terms...

This year I found out that a Grade may not only be vocabulary... sometimes it's, besides vocabulary, also some tools... and it's upon the scientist that uses those tools to define and shape around science itself... because, that's what Synthetic Biology is about at its final stage... isn't it?

I'm finishing now my graduate courses, bearing a feeling that you never quite abandon being a padawan, you always learn... being on a metabolic engineering course in Mumbay, India, spent three months at Uppsala working on a cyanobacterial vector... and one thing in common: trying to build my own pathway in science...

We're at the same point at the circle, but we're forward in the spiral. If last year we aimed on making a team, finishing the project and doing that on time, ... I'm much more 'self-demanding' this time: I hope to do things better and push further... because I believe that the mental shift that implies Synthetic Biology is worth the time, the effort, ... I grew, in many ways, as we all do, and I've used to participate in those debates with friends and colleagues about what was all the fuss about Synthetic Biology... So far I still don't understand the point of those who stand back and argue that it just can't be done, without even trying the game... maybe is whatever 'game' implies to them, or that they take science too seriously... I don't know...

Comunication

You can reach me at beornk at gmail.com or at armontag at mat.upv.es