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Who We Are 🧬
UCL Biotechnology Society is a community of students who are genuinely interested in where biology is going and what happens when it leaves the lab. Members come from biochemical engineering, biological sciences, chemistry, medicine, computer science, economics, and plenty of courses with no obvious link to biotech at all, which is rather the point. The society runs talks with people building companies in gene therapy, cultivated meat, synthetic biology and drug development, lectures from UCL academics on the research happening a few buildings away, careers programming for anyone trying to work out how to get into the industry, and socials for the conversations that never happen in a lecture theatre.
No prior knowledge is assumed anywhere in the programme. Curiosity is the only prerequisite.
Coming Up 📅
Freshers Fair, Saturday 3 October. Come find the stall, meet the committee, and sign up. First look at the full year ahead.
Taster Picnic, Regent's Park, Thursday 8 October. 🧺 Free and open to everyone, no membership required. A relaxed introduction to the society and the people in it before term properly starts.
Inside Industry: Bharat Chudasama, Monday 12 October. 🎤 Co-founder and Tea Master at Hope & Glory, the Hertfordshire organic speciality tea company behind 8 Great Taste stars and the tea served at the Waldorf Hilton. Before that came a first-class pharmacology degree and years of commercial leadership in the global pharmaceutical industry. A talk about what a science degree actually opens up beyond the bench, why leaving pharma made sense, and what carries over from drug commercialisation into building a consumer brand from nothing.
Pipettes and Pints, Thursday 15 October. 🍻 The proper start-of-year social, with beer pong. Expect a large turnout and very little talking about lectures.
More socials and more Inside Industry talks are being added throughout the term, so keep an eye on the WhatsApp community and Instagram.
What We're Here For 🎯
Biotechnology is one of the few fields where an undergraduate can still read a paper published this month and understand roughly what is happening at the frontier. The gap between the lecture slides and the actual industry, though, is wide and largely invisible from inside a degree.
The society exists to close that gap. That means bringing the people doing the work into the same room as the people studying it, making the industry legible before graduation rather than after, and building a network across UCL and beyond that is actually useful when it comes to finding a supervisor, a placement, a collaborator, or a co-founder.
Membership 🎟️
Membership costs £5.99 for the year.
Members get discounted tickets to socials and ticketed events across the year, priority access to events that fill up, and first sight of opportunities shared with the committee, including internships, scholarships and research openings.
Lab tours are in the works for this year, with Hoxton Farms, Meatly, Orchard Therapeutics and the Francis Crick Institute 🏛️ among the places being approached. Nothing is confirmed yet, but places will be tied to membership once they are.
Click here to join our WhatsApp community for event updates, last-minute announcements, and everything happening between newsletters. 💬
Also This Year 🔭
Careers programming. Career talks across biotech, pharma and life sciences, plus CV workshops and internship application masterclasses. 💼 Past masterclasses have been led by students who landed internships at HSBC, Macfarlanes, BNP Paribas, Barclays and Morgan Lewis, so the advice comes from people who recently got through the process themselves.
Laidlaw panel. 🏆 A dedicated session on navigating the Laidlaw Scholarship application, run by people who have been through it: six members of this year's committee are Laidlaw Scholars. Last year, 6 of the 30 UCL Laidlaw Scholars came directly from this society, and that pipeline carries into this year.
Lightning Lectures ⚡ continue every Monday, giving UCL academics a platform to share live research. Last year's topics ran from engineering adeno-associated viruses for biomanufacturing to digital bioprocessing, protein engineering and the design of manufacturable biologics, and renewable feedstocks for the circular bioeconomy. Specific, technical, and genuinely at the frontier rather than polished overview talks.
Inter-university programme 🤝 connecting with biotech and synthetic biology societies at Imperial, King's and beyond. Joint events, panels, and the kind of cross-university network that matters when looking for collaborators or co-founders.
Subcultured 📰 is the society's biotechnology magazine. One longform story every Thursday: scientists who experimented on themselves, technologies ignored for decades before the world caught up, discoveries made by accident that rewired how we understand life. Written to be read start to finish, with a coffee, without a science degree. Free, weekly, no spam.
And the socials. Pub nights, bowling 🎳, quiz nights, games evenings, and more, because community is the point rather than a bonus.
2025-26: What We Did 🚀
A big year.
Inside Industry brought some of the most interesting companies in biotech to campus. Notpla on engineering seaweed-based materials to replace single-use plastics. Orchard Therapeutics on gene therapy correcting rare genetic diseases at the DNA level. Outpost Bio on using machine learning to decode the gut microbiome and build the next generation of live biotherapeutics. Speakers from GSK, Takeda and Novartis covered antibody engineering through to the future of drug development. And through the partnership with Meatly and Hoxton Farms 🥩, the series went deep into cultivated meat and how stem cell biology and precision biomanufacturing are building an entirely new food system from the ground up.
Lightning Lectures ran every Monday, with UCL academics sharing live research at the frontier of bioprocessing, protein engineering and the circular bioeconomy.
AI in Drug Discovery and Development panel 🤖 brought together the VP of Diagnostic Imaging, Data and AI at a major pharma company, the founding partner of a leading biotech venture fund, the CEO of BioCortex, and the Head of AI for Life Sciences at Deloitte. It covered where AI is actually delivering in drug development, and where the hype still outpaces the biology.
Alongside all of that: internship application masterclasses, a life sciences career panel, partnerships with 8+ UCL societies and external organisations including AstraZeneca and Hoxton Farms, and first-year student reps recruited in December so the next cohort had a genuine stake from day one. 🌱
Plus the socials. Pub nights, bowling, games nights and lab tours at Hoxton Farms, because the best scientific conversations happen away from the lecture hall too.
Anyone excited about where biology is going will find their people here.