Jun 26

Jun 26 Gateway to Building Connections and Launching a Career in Synthetic Biology: Porfirio's iGEM Journey

Interviewed By: Daniela Alvarez (Regional Reporter for Latin America - 2022)

PhD Porfirio Quintero is a former team member of team iGEM UANL_Mty-Mexico (currently iGEM FCB-UANL). He participated from 2011 to 2013 and is currently working as a Design Engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks. We talked to him to get to know his pathway, as well as ask for some advice for new iGEMers and iGEM alumni.

Starting a team: founding one of the first Mexican iGEM teams

Since it was the first time that his university participated in iGEM he got interested as soon as he heard about it, and that’s when he decided to join the team to work on multiple projects during three years of his undergraduate studies. During that time, he worked with light-sensitive bacterial communities, an easy-to-recover arsenic biosensor and chelator, and RNA thermometers.

Finding your passion

When we asked him how he discovered his passion he gave us two types of answers.

The first one: A big chance component. Success = talent + luck. Talking to the right people and being in the right place can enormously impact your pathway!

The second one: iGEM! By participating, it became more normal for him to interact with people in the privileged world i.e. with access to better opportunities and resources. Before he participated in iGEM he thought differently about science; for him, iGEM was a platform to know people that develop themselves in the field; to collaborate with them, and at the end of the day those interactions took him to the place he is right now. For him, iGEM was a great opportunity to get to know people and be exposed to the world that otherwise he wouldn’t be exposed to.

“Connections, building relationship, can play a very big role in ones path, and reaching out to people that are following a path you want to follow can be very productive. Do not hesitate on reaching out to people.”

Beyond iGEM: what to do after participating?

After his participation in iGEM, he just got busy and didn’t stay in touch with the community. However, he was invited by a team to participate in a series of talks a few years ago and starting getting involved again; he was a mentor of a Mexico’s Design League team in 2021, because they got in contact with Ginkgo looking for mentors. He still remains in touch with the people that participated with him in the competition during his years as a team member, and is open to continue to help iGEMers.

Working at Ginkgo Bioworks, The Design Company

Right after he started graduate school in California, studied for 6 years, and moved to Boston for his first job in the industry. Now he is working at Ginkgo Bioworks as a Design Engineer, where he designs DNA libraries in order to find potential paths to engineer strains to produce compounds of interest. His group specializes in DNA design.

Communication is one of the main skills needed in his day to day work, and mostly because he is now working at Gingko, which is a company where a lot of people are involved and divided into different team works, so it is important to keep a lot of things on track to achieve the objectives. He has had to get used to some things he didn’t actually practice that much during his studies.

Join us in Paris and celebrate the 20th Year of iGEM at the 2023 Grand Jamboree.

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