What is Nona Talks?

A one-day event to bring together industry and academic parties in the open-source app synthetic biology community. “Nona Talks” is focused on community building, idea generation, and education.

Registration & Survey

Want to help fund this? Reach out to jeray@nonasoftware.org

Discussion Topics

How can we improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in S.T.E.M?

DATE: March 24th 2022 10 a.m – 11 a.m. EST

Background

The Nona Research Foundation (Nona; http://www.nonasoftware.org) was created to broaden participation, increase access, and advance innovation in the design, distribution, documentation, maintenance, and use of open-source software and tools in the fields of synthetic biology and bio-design automation. Research using Nona’s software and other tools will lead to advances and improvement in health and healthcare, energy production and storage, materials manufacture, protection of the environment, and human welfare.  Nona’s goal is to provide community- based resources to make the open- source software environment in synthetic biology a global success.  Toward that goal, Nona will host workshops named “Nona Talks” (to contrast the hackathons entitled “Nona Works”). 

Objectives of this Nona Talks: 

    • Identify barriers to increasing diversity in STEM
    • Prioritize potential approaches to improving or developing opportunities for inclusion
    • Build the community and establish lines of communication and education

Preliminary Agenda

10:00–10:05 am Introductions, meeting goals, and context

Moderator: To be Announced

Discussants, 5–7 min each for below topics

10:05–10:20 am Current Initiatives

What brought you into the STEM field?

How can we get the next generation ready to join the community?

10:20–10:40 am What Initiatives are needed?

What are the critical challenges? Examples:

    • How can we reproduce the circumstances that brought people in?
    • Is there a way to overcome educational institutional issues?

Which challenges are most fundamental across the community?

10:40–11am Action Items and next steps

How can existing initiatives be improved?

What types of new initiatives could be developed or incorporated?

Where do we go from here?