Abstract The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide synthetic biology event where pre-college and college students design, build and test biological systems to address societal needs. Designing a biological system requires a good development of engineering systems thinking, especially due to living organisms' complex behavior. According to the Capacity for Engineering Systems Thinking (CEST) model, good systems thinkers need to understand the whole system and the interconnection of its parts, consider non-engineering factors, and understand analogies and parallelisms between systems, among other cognitive competencies. For this study, we are interested in analyzing how iGEM participants exhibit cognitive competencies. Particularly, we aim to answer the research question: What evidence of cognitive competencies within engineering systems thinking exists when multidisciplinary teams design a biological system to address a societal need? We followed a Qualitative Descriptive Research approach to analyze the artifacts (team's wikis) of six teams from different countries. All teams were comprised mostly of undergraduate engineering students from multiple disciplines and recognized for their designed biological system's quality. For this work in progress, we shared our initial framework to explore the systems thinking cognitive competencies of iGEM participants, open coded the content of one of the wikis, and presented some preliminary evidence of the competencies. Through continuing research, we will further explore systems thinking in biological systems design by analyzing the remainder of the six teams' wikis.