Prof. King Lau Chow Division of Life Science, HKUST
King L. Chow earned his PhD in Cell Biology from the Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently Professor of Life Science and Biomedical Engineering. Professor Chow’s research work spans a broad spectrum of biological sciences, including molecular genetics, genomics, neural developmental biology, the evolution of behavior and synthetic biology, involving a many different interdisciplinary collaboration. He is engaging iGEM activities for the past 8 years and sees it a very effective way of vertically integrated education.
Dr. Jessica Ce Mun Tang Division of Life Science, HKUST
This is the sixth year that I have been an instructor for the HKUST iGEM team. This year is different from previous years as we have a joint HKUST -Rice University team. The two groups have never met before but will be working together and it will be great to see them working well together as one team and being able to learn from one another.
Hello from Rice!
Dr. Beth Beason BioSciences at Rice
K. Beth Beason-Abmayr came to Rice in 1998 as a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate in the Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology (BCB) and just completed her 17th year as teaching faculty. Her teaching labs are located in the basement of Anderson Biological Laboratories, which Rice students affectionately named The Dungeon, as in Dante’s Inferno. Beth got involved with iGEM in spring 2006 when Dr. George Bennett, BCB Chair, told her he’d signed Rice up for a team and thought it would be great for her undergraduate lab courses if she led a team. Rice competed in 2006-2008, and their 2008 team project was BioBeer. She began teaching a synthetic biology lab course to undergraduates in 2008, and it’s one of her most popular lab courses. She returned to iGEM as a judge at the America Regionals and World Jamboree in 2011. She has served as a co-head judge since 2012 and is now a member of the Executive Judging Committee. Beth is super excited about the joint HKUST-Rice team and can’t wait until the Giant Jamboree! When she isn’t teaching, she enjoys reading, hiking, and traveling to exotic places - each year, she and her husband take a ski vacation in Utah (ok, so Utah may not be exotic but snow certainly is to those of us living in Houston).
Dr. Jonathan Silberg BioSciences at Rice
Prof. Silberg, affectionately known as "Joff," came to Houston, TX, from sunny SoCal in 2005. Previous to holding an Associate Professor position in BioSciences and Bioengineering at Rice University, Joff received a B.S. in Biology, a B.S. in Chemistry, and a PhD in Biology from UC Irvine. His current research spans a wide range of disciplines and ranges from understanding Fe-S cluster biogenesis to structure-guided recombination. He teaches Physical Chemistry for Biosciences and advised the iGEM teams at Rice from 2006-2008. Besides focusing on his lab and courses, Prof. Silberg enjoys running and mentoring students from various backgrounds, including those who are in high school or community college.
