SoundBio Lab is a big supporter of all DIY biologist and that extends beyond our immediate community. When we learned of a new effort in Africa to start up a lab, we jumped in to help. Thanks to some extra donations, we were able to put together a nice starter kit for our friend Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou who is starting a biohacking makerspace in Cameroon, Africa. Our starter set included some plastic consumables, simple lap equipment such as a scale, vortex, gel box, and a few basic reagents.

Our friend Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou is currently the International President of APSOHA, the Association for the Promotion of OpenScience in Haiti and Africa. As a PhD student in public communication at Université Laval, his thesis focused on the maker movement and free culture in sub-Saharan Africa. With a Bachelor in Biochemistry, and a Master in Didactics of sciences, Thomas Mboa is the perfect man to promote DIY Biohacking in Africa.

So it turns out, sending items to Africa is not the easiest thing to do! SoundBio brought 2 packed suitcases full of supplies to the iGEM competition at MIT last November, 2017. Unfortunately, we couldn’t immediately find someone to take the supplies to Thomas in Africa. The BosLab was kind enough to store the suitcases until David Kong and Connie Chow were able to bring them along to Africa when they attended AfricaOSH in April, 2018. It may have taken a few months longer that we had hoped, but the supplies finally made it to Thomas!

SoundBio will hopefully be visiting the new lab in 2018, where we will be able to bring additional items such as bacterial strains, plasmids, and other useful reagents.