Team:UMBC-Maryland/Team

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Team

MEET THE 2015 UMBC iGEM TEAM!

Our Advisors

Dr. Cynthia Wagner

Phone: 410-455-1024

Email: cwagner@umbc.edu

Dr. Stephen Freeland

Email: freeland@umbc.edu

Team Members

Sam Keating

I have been on the UMBC iGEM team for two years and was co-president for one year. I am a senior biochemical engineer and I plan on going to graduate school next year. I help with a lot of the planning inside and outside of the lab and make sure that we have adequate resources and plans for our project. I helped to train new members at the beginning of the year. I also looked a lot at the gene sequences of our genes of interest and updated our entries on the wiki and the registry pages.

Pranesh Navarathna

I am a senior Chemical Engineering major in the Bioengineering Track. I am Co-President of the 2015 UMBC iGEM team and have been involved in working with faculty and student government to obtain funding and support for our project. During the summer, I organized, planned and executed experiments along with team members. My lab experience includes working extensively with fungal fermentation and phenotypic profiling. I also have experience with industrial microbial platform development with E.coli. I intend to pursue graduate study in Bioengineering. I am especially proud with what we accomplished this summer and to be part of UMBC's first appearance at the Giant Jamboree!

Mukta Bain

I am a senior at UMBC. My major is general biology BA. After BA I want to get my master in public health. I have previously worked in the lab for classes. My contribution to the team was helping with the wet lab and working side by side with other team members.

May Li

I am a senior Biochemistry major and will be pursuing a medical degree after graduation. My previous research experience is in the realm of computational biochemistry research and organic chemistry research. I am grateful to experience the biological aspect of research through iGEM, and have been involved in running/designing experiments, as well as other organizational tasks. I love being in lab with other iGEM members over the summer and am very proud of the work we've done.

Natithorn Bhusri

I am a senior at UMBC and my major is Biochemistry. As secretary of iGEM, I planned meetings and wet lab dates for our project. I also aided in updating our notebook and attributions on the wiki pages. I helped conduct the optical density(growth) experiments and processed the data as graphs. I plan to attend graduate school next year and further my studies in Toxicology. I am really proud of how much we have done this summer and I am glad that I participated in it.

Joseph Sparenberg

Joseph Sparenberg took an odd path to get where he is today because he graduated high school in 1997, then stopped going to college after 3 semesters and took a 10 year hiatus working various jobs. Finally returning to school part time in 2008, he has continued part time to this day. He is now a senior double majoring in Biochemistry and Biology and will be graduating in May 2016. He plans on pursuing a PhD in Biochemistry with focusing on cancer research. He started with the iGEM team May 2015 and has contributed by reading relevant literature, helping with the bioinformatics portion of the lab, helping with the late shifts of the day long OD experiments and helping wherever needed while also working full time.

William Larsen Angel, Jr.

I graduated with a biology degree from UMBC in 2014 and am beginning a master’s program in molecular biology in the fall. I have been with the iGEM team since its beginning and have fulfilled many roles in the team. I acted as the treasurer and helped raise the money to pay the competition expenses. I also acted as a project designer and helped elucidate the more difficult biological aspects of the project. I am happy I had the opportunity to participate with this team, and I hope that the team continues for years to come.

John "Richard" Jayman

I am a senior biology major with aspirations of medical school. My lab experience involves testing novel molecular therapies for prostate cancer on a mouse model. In the iGEM arena, I am working with the UMBC team to take copper measurements and to prepare overnights for our engineered bacteria.

Pari Majethia

My major is Biology B.S. and I am a senior at UMBC. I had a great experience working on the iGEM project and learning about the effects of copper on the E.coli cells. I helped conduct the experiments

Alex Kuznetsov

I am a senior biochemistry student at UMBC. Some relevant experiences that I have consist of undergraduate experimental biology, as well as biochemistry laboratory courses. During this summer I created recombinant plasmids, as well as preformed bacterial transformations, optical density readings, for a number of transformed cell lines with the UMBC iGEM team.

Mark Saint-John Kerr

My name is Mark and I'm a senior.I joined iGEM to see if it could help me improve my lab skill set. I've always had a thing for biology and I hope that our project can stand up to the competition this year. I like cooking, baking, and just working with my hands in general which is why the lab setting suits me just fine.