Public Engagement

26 July 2026 · Houston · Booth

Our conversation with Dr. Corona Moreno had shown us that sensory-driven food refusal was a major cause of malnutrition we had not accounted for, and that the care these families need was something our team should be thinking about. Rather than leave that as a gap on a page, we wanted to meet the families themselves, to hear about sensory-related food preferences from the people living with them, and to offer something useful in return. It was a deliberate choice to learn from caregivers directly rather than from literature about caregivers.

We presented our research and information about nutrition in neurodivergent children. We brought visual nutrition charts showing the major food groups, which we used to explain balanced diets and how eating habits support school performance, and alongside them the $3 Meal Plan cards with their QR codes linking to full ingredient lists and a video of each recipe being cooked. For many families, affording healthy food that also suits their child’s preferences is a real struggle, and simple recipes they could take home made that easier.

Two things we had been treating as one came apart. A meal has to be affordable and sensory-acceptable, and focusing on budget and nutrients alone does not help: a $3 recipe gets used less unless it satisfies the sensory needs of the child. Families also made the economic and societal barriers concrete in a way the literature had not, which sharpened how we think about deployment and about the entrepreneurial side of the project. The fact that we had made the recipes ourselves mattered to people; it built a connection with the community that a printed handout would not have.

Sensory acceptability became a separate axis in how we evaluate the meal plan rather than something folded into nutrition. Public-facing materials now lead with the recipes and place the biology second. More broadly, the event confirmed what the rest of our Human Practices work had been pointing at: addressing acute malnutrition requires both scientific research and real engagement with the people that research is meant to serve. Listening to parents made our project more inclusive and more applicable to the children we are actually describing.

All our other conversations were about individual children, why they refuse food, and what happens to the food they eat. We also wanted to learn about the availability of nutritious food in other communities. We identified CSA through a systematic effort to map out NGOs in India where malnutrition is a major challenge in children and adults, especially in rural areas. CSA was referred to us as a premier organization working on issues related to farming, with a dedicated project focused on providing nutritious food to communities suffering from malnutrition.

In person, then over Zoom · webinar 20 September 2026

Our project PI, Dr. Sharmistha Sarkar, and lab mentor, Dr. Kunal Rai, visited Dr. Rajashekar during their India visit this summer. Later, Dr. Rajashekar spoke with the iGEM students in a Zoom webinar.

This conversation helped us understand that malnutrition cannot be treated as only a biological or nutritional problem. Dr. Rajashekar explained that the major causes in the communities his organization work with include lack of awareness, limited access to nutritious food, and a loss of crop diversity. Farmers shifted from growing many foods for themselves toward monocropping crops such as cotton and rice.

That mattered because it moved the question of whether a future solution works scientifically. A solution also has to be affordable, accessible, culturally practical and sustainable for the people using it. Rather than seeing our project as something that could solve malnutrition by itself, this meeting reinforced that it would have to work alongside larger food access and community-based approaches.

Two design principles came out of it that apply to anything we might one day distribute. Sustainability and independence matter: a product families cannot sustain without an outside supplier is a dependency rather than a solution, which is the lesson of the open-pollinated seed, and an engineered probiotic is by its nature the opposite, it can only come from a manufacturer. And trust has to be built locally, by people from inside the community, before any product reaches anyone. Both principles are uncomfortable for a live biotherapeutic, and both belong on record.

15 July 2026 · Call

We are students and scientists, not public health experts, and our contribution sits at the scientific end of a much larger problem. But a supplement that only works on paper helps nobody, so we wanted to understand what it would take to deliver our engineered probiotic: the production, the cost, the distribution, and the obstacles we should be thinking about now rather than discovering later.

Video call. We showed her our project and asked what it would take to get something like it from a lab to a child in Bangladesh. She answered with a list of practical questions we had never asked ourselves, and called it a laundry list. We have treated it as a specification ever since. Ms. Ferdous has given permission to be cited as an expert consultant to our project and agreed to review a written summary of our considerations.

The questions we could not answer. What happens to a child who already has helminths or anaemia? What happens when a child takes this while living somewhere the hygiene conditions are poor? How long does a child need to take it? What does it cost the family? Who distributes it, and for how long? We had assumed an otherwise healthy child, and she told us that in the communities she works in, that assumption often does not hold.

Malnutrition in Bangladesh is not mainly a food-quantity problem. Gut health is a major cause, and it is tied to the water, sanitation and hygiene conditions families live in. Climate change is an emerging pressure we had not considered. She was also candid that distributing multivitamin powder, which her own foundation does, does not address the real need.

She also asked why a malnourished child loses appetite in the first place. Is it that they do not want to eat, or is an underlying infection causing it? If it is the second, our enzyme treats a symptom of something else, the same point Ms. Gardner made two months later from a hospital in Houston, arrived at independently from a field program in Bangladesh.

We stopped calling our supplement a solution. It is one component of a broader nutritional strategy, and it only means anything if healthy food is already available. The questions about comorbidities, duration, cost and distribution are now part of how we discuss implementation rather than things we defer.

What testing anything there would require. Lab-based intervention research in Bangladesh needs government approval and a hospital-based setting, so doctors can respond if a child reacts badly. She pointed us to ICDDR,B, which already conducts approved undernutrition research.

What we committed to. Three things were recorded at the meeting: that we would build Sajida’s feedback into our project so it stays aligned with conditions in Bangladesh; that Tamanna Ferdous would be cited as an expert consultant; and that we would pursue the screening tool described below as a separate project. We also agreed to write up our considerations and open questions and send them to her for review.