Difference between revisions of "Team:Waterloo/Team"

James Hawley

James was the Project Director for the Waterloo team this year, and his responsibilities ranged from idea creation and criticism, to making timeline and directional decisions about the project, to organizing team leads and members, to facilitating meeting with advisors and other faculty, to managing the team’s finances. He also was involved in running PyRosetta simulations for the team’s math group, planning experiments with the wet lab and math leads, and overseeing the development of the surveys and scale-up portion of the project.

Matt Smart

Tessa Alexanian

Peivand Sadat Mousavi

Peivand is the fourth year undergraduate student majouring in Honours Biomedical Sciences. She was exposed to the field of synthetic biology by joining Waterloo iGEM 2013 team. She loved the lab too much that she kept volunteering and working in different labs continuously even during the study terms. Now she is one of the wet lab lead of Waterloo iGEM 2015 and she is living in the lab and absolutely loving it! Peivand loves learning, that’s all it matters to her.

Steven ten Holder

As one of two wet lab leads, Steven contributed to early-stage design and helped train, manage, and troubleshoot the lab’s cloning and experimentation efforts. In addition to his enthusiasm for advancements in science and technology he finds time for skateboarding, piano, and entrepreneurship. His appeal for genetic engineering is best summarized by an old TED talk delivered by Gregory Stock: “A generation or so away… That's when we're going to begin to use this knowledge to modify ourselves. Now I don't mean extra gills or something -- something we care about, like aging.”

Nadine Haymour

Nadine, the Team Lead of the Policy and Practices team, helped with outreach events such as ESQ (engineering science quest), and SHAD Valley. SHe is very interested in the ethics as well as commercialization of a produced lab product. With this interest she helped design and create a survey, and a scale-up document to explain how the lab’s product would be approved, sold, and utilized in the real world. During this, she helped a little bit in the lab for various small experiments when extra hands were needed. In her spare time she enjoys exploring new places, eating new foods and learning about very bizarre diseases and viruses, and the various methods of how to treat them.

Bill Lin

Bill has been involved in writing some funding proposals and searching for conference housing in his first year on iGEM. In his free time, he enjoys reading, cooking, painting, and listening to music.

Alicia Dubinski

Alicia was involved in designing and carrying out experiments for all aspects of the project. In particular, she has been leading the design and lab work of the construction of the pCAMBIA-CRISPR plasmid, and the transformation into plants. She absolutely loves being in the lab and has grown passionate about synthetic biology. If she isn’t troubleshooting an experiment, she is probably at the rink playing hockey or watching some type of sporting event.

Ayan A. Abukar

Ayan’s 2015 iGEM journey began with her researching for the sgRNA swap component of the project. Soon enough she found herself pipetting PCR’s, ligating constructs and conducting transformations after the sun had set with her fingers crossed awaiting the next day’s results. Aside from devoting 73% of her life to the lab and referring to herself as the "King of iGEM" as often as possible; the remaining 27% of Ayan’s life is devoted to her pending writing career, pretending to be a photographer and just being an endless supply of sarcasm.

Erin Laidley

Erin is the "Queen of iGEM."" Her primary contribution involved caring for the Arabidopsis plants (affectionately referred to as “her babies”) and preparing them for floral dips. Erin also occasionally pipetted and transformed things in the lab. When she isn’t in the greenhouse, Erin can be found with her nose in a book, playing the ukulele, or making a fool out of herself at Zumba classes. Her propensity for insightful commentary is renowned throughout the team and often misinterpreted as “sass.”

Kate Beggs

Kate is a student in psychology who somehow managed to do enough biology to be useful on the lab team. She has been helping with various smaller tasks involved in the construction of Cas9 and is also organizing the testing in protoplasts. In her spare time Kate likes playing music, talking about politics, and listening to reruns of the this American life podcast. That being said she is studying for MCATs this term so doesn't really have any time to spare.

Lauren Morse

Lauren has contributed to the creation of the GFP/RFP Target plasmid and pco_Cas9 cloning. She has been researching the structure of the Cas9 protein and the mutability of its base pairs in the design of an sgRNA swap system. Lauren is passionate about research in molecular biology and psychology, and volunteers as client support in a variety of organizations that offer counselling for mental illness, pregnancy options, and sexual health-related topics. Her favourite movie is Cloud Atlas, and she loves finding the time on weekends to go out for a picnic and play tennis.

Patrick Diep

As the co-op student for the summer, Patrick’s colloquially known job title is “Mitochondria.” He is the lab’s powerhouse who supplies the team with energy through his relentless effort to help lead the construction of the CRISPR/Cas9 immune system, and re-engineer the sgRNA scaffold. Whether he’s running advanced multiplexing protocols, or just cleaning the lab space, Patrick is in the lab from sunrise to sunset to ensure his team leads experience as little stress as possible. Outside of the lab, Patrick’s committed to promoting gender equality through WiSTEM, welcoming first-year students with Science Orientation, and helping develop the future’s first public stem cell storage service at CryoCapsule.

Peter Hoang

Peter has mostly been involved in the diagnostics surrounding the pCAMBIA construct. Peter likes squash. Swag.

Samantha Hirniak

Vivian Chan

Vivian has been working on various parts of the overall project. When she’s not working in her full time co-op lab, she can usually be found in the iGEM lab in the afternoons and on the occasional weekend. In her free time, Vivian likes to crochet, make paper models, and watch movies/TV series, especially those in the DC/Marvel Universe.

Zoe Wu

Zoe has primarily been helping in the lab with the various troubleshooting efforts and associated lab work involved in the team’s efforts to reach the final project goal. In addition to this, she will be actively involved with the floral dip process, nearing the end of the project where many conclusions and final results are made. In her spare time, she enjoys practicing latin dance, reading, and catching up with friends and family.

Chris Salahub

Emily Watson

Isaac Ellmen

John Drake

Joyce Zhang

Kevin Thai

Laura Vaughan

Mark Lubberts

Robert Gooding-Townsend

Zoe Humphries

Adrian Monrad

Adrian has worked on the public synthetic bio opinion survey regarding genetic modification in plants, as well scale-up extension of 2014 Cas9 plant virus intervention lab project. He also helped organize the SHAD valley high school workshop, and researched ethical and safety concerns, and promotion of synthetic biology.

Adrian van Dyk

Adrian is a second year biochemistry student at Waterloo, and this was his first year with the iGEM team, he was part of the Policy and Practices team. Within policy and practices he focused on contacting and getting input from regulatory bodies and industry with regards to our project, as well as the legal issues surrounding CRISPR Cas9. Adrian also helped to get the public’s opinion on genetically modification, especially with regards to crop plants, by working on a public opinion survey with the rest of the team. In his free time he enjoys canoe tripping and camping.

Julia Zangoulos

Julia is involved in the attitude survey aiming to understand the public perspective on GMO’s and is also involved in the scale-up project. She investigated various aspect of the application of the CRISPR system as an antiviral vaccine. Julia spends most of her free time volunteering and playing piano in coffee shops. She loves physics, sketching and poetry.

Melanie Emmerson

Melanie is a third year Science & Business student and a first year member of the iGEM team. As a part of the Policies and Practices subteam, Melanie has been involved in researching the safety of potential scale-up options and proposing techno-moral scenarios for the commercialization of the project. She enjoys imagining what a future could look like with a little more synthetic biology in industrial design. When she’s not at her full time co-op job or doing course work you can find her reading, travelling,or catching up on some usually much needed sleep!

Nathan Ing

Nathan is a member of the Policy and Practices and Outreach Team and is working on the scale-up project. He has contacted a number of members of the agricultural industry to assist in guiding our team’s scale up project. In addition, he will also explore the ethics and develop the techno-moral scenario. Outside of iGEM, he enjoys watching and playing sports including soccer and ice hockey as well as learning new languages.

Patricia Balbon

Patricia enjoyed having the opportunity to think about the interrelations between the world and synthetic biology again, as part of the Policy and Practices team. She started the year with generating potential design requirements for CRISPieR Plants and later critiqued the design of a survey on gene editing and genetically modified foods, as well as created associate supplementary materials to empower the public with knowledge to engage in conversation about our project. Patricia is an apprehensive flutist and occasionally haunts Waterloo iGEM’s lab benches as hobbies.

Riddhita De

Riddhita has involved herself with various aspects of the attitude survey, to better understand the public perspectives on GMOs. She has also been helping with the product design as part of the scale up project. About me: I treat every day as a journey to learn, dream and grow. This summer has been an especially enriching one with the iGEM team here. I enjoyed meeting and working alongside so many driven individuals, who worked tirelessly to bring our ideas to life. When not at school, I love to travel, play a good game of Monopoly and spend time with my friends and family!

Tatiana Portelli-Graham

This is Tatiana’s first year on the Policy and Practices and iGEM team. She was excited to be a part of the science community at University of Waterloo, so much that she wore her lab coat to the try-outs! She is helping with the outreach survey that will be passed out to individuals in the community and is looking into communications as well. Tatiana is also a huge foodie, loves seeing new places, and enjoys binge watching tv shows on Netflix.

Dr. Andrew Doxey

Dr. Barbara Moffatt

Dr. Brian Ingalls

Dr. Marc Aucoin

Dr. Trevor Charles