Team:Waterloo/Team

Leads & Admin

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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.
Tessa Alexanian: Tessa is one of the 2015 mathematical modelling leads, a position she landed in after scraping through countless research databases to "justify" the simplifications for last year's CRISPR model. She tries to appear knowledgeable by nodding a lot during meetings, commenting on PRs, and telling other people to read papers she googled. Her spare time is occupied with comics, cycling, and too many unfinished crafting projects.
Matt Smart: Matt is one of the 2015 mathematical modelling leads, a position he landed after criticizing the justifications for simplifications in last year's CRISPR model. He tries to appear knowledgeable by disagreeing a lot during meetings, rejecting PRs, and telling other people to read papers he googled. His spare time is occupied with math, video games, reading, and not sleeping.
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.

Lab

Wet lab, protocols, and experiments

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.
Apeksha Sapkota: Apeksha is a second year biochemistry student, and as a member of the Lab and Design team she has been assisting with the basic laboratory tasks. She has transformed bacterial cells, ran gels, and ligated constructs. Apeksha enjoys travelling and exploring new places when not in school or working.
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: This is Sam's third year as a part of the Waterloo iGEM team. After spending two years doing only Mathematical Modelling for the team, she decided to venture into the lab to learn more about experimental design and protocols. Here she learned a lot about floral dips, design of genetic constructs, trouble shooting, transformation and other basic cloning techniques. She also remained involved with the Mathematical Modelling team on more of a consulting basis. She is extremely interested how we can use both mathematical theory, engineering design principles, and biological knowledge to solve problems in today's society.
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.

Math

Dry lab, computer lab, and MATLAB

Chris Salahub: 2015 is Chris's first year participating in iGEM. Although his major is statistics, he relished the opportunity iGEM offered to try problems which are, to him, very novel. He spent the majority of his time on the team working with the different subgroups responsible for modelling the action of CRISPR and Cas9. Within these groups he mostly took minutes. When he isn't busy working on things he needs to do, he likes to lift weights, read news articles, and hang out with friends.
Emily Watson: Though Emily is an aged, cynical student (3rd year eng), this is her first year with iGEM. It is quite refreshing. Emily is on the Mathematical Modelling team as part of the Viral Assembly group - a group dedicated to demystifying and modelling the inner workings of CaMV infection. Specifically, she's contributed to an intracellular network map, developing diffential equations and unearthing parameters. It has been quite a fun challenge to work on a problem with no concrete answer. She would like to thank 'google.ca' for helping her with all the complicated biology words.
Isaac Ellmen: In Isaac's first year on the team, he was primarily involved with modelling Cas9 cuts. He also dabbled in gRNA design, protein modelling, wiki design and pretty much anything he could get his hands on. This was Isaac's first introduction to (synthetic) biology and he thinks it is absurdly cool. Outside of iGEM, Isaac enjoys coding, acting, math and crying over The Leafs.
John Drake: John is in his third year working with iGEM. This year he primarily worked with the viral assembly subteam in trying to figure out how virions are put together in infected cells and how we can stop them. He also worked with the viral spread team to build an agent-based model of viral spread because ABMs are cool. His spare time is occupied by the internet.
Joyce Zhang: This is Joyce's first year with iGEM and in university as a BioMed Eng. She is a part of the subteam which modelled and researched viral spread and plant defences. She enjoyed researching and poring over journal articles, as well as seeing ideas spring to life and building something from the ground up. Additionally, she was estatic at the opportunity to attempt to wrangle new programming languages for the sake of modelling things. In her spare time, she likes to draw and paint, contemplate the mysteries of the universe and play in orchestras.
Kevin Thai: This is Kevin's second year on the team, and he's part of the Tridimensional Trifecta with Kim and Mark. He is in the third year of the Applied Math program, and spent a lot of time this year looking at PyRosetta and PyMOL.
Kim Nguyen: Kim is a Biology Joint Math student and is currently 1/3 of the tri-dimensional trifecta. Her work for iGEM includes sifting through papers, helping pick out sgRNA targets, writing python scripts (while simultaneously figuring out how to python properly), and designing cas9 variants to be modelled in PyRosetta. Kim is also helping with the wiki design since she sold already sold her soul to web design for money. In her spare time she enjoys hanging out with dogs, biking places, cooking, eating dessert, and being facetious.
Laura Vaughan: This is Laura's first year as a part of iGEM after gleefully being introduced to the team last winter. Part of the Viral Assembly subgroup, she contributed an amalgamated preliminary viral network map and a large amount of research on plant defenses on the cellular level, in addition to modeling equations in SymBiology and helping out with the wiki, visuals for the final presentation and miscellaneous tasks along the way. She enjoys spending her time learning as much as she can about synthetic biology with a side of physics, design and coding.
Mark Lubberts: Mark is a biology student who's managed to escape from mechanical engineering. He's part of the Tridimensional Trifecta, and spent a lot of time trying to understand Cas9 structure, and getting PyRosetta/PyMOL set up on Windows. If he wasn't busy writing this bio he'd be looking into how to mutate Cas9 in PyRosetta as well. He helped with finding the different sgRNA targets, and also wrote a couple wiki pages. Puns cause him physical pain, though Tessa doesn't seem to mind. Because she's terrible. When not busy with iGEM he's working on his 499 project, because Lactobacillus is a cruel organism.
Robert Gooding-Townsend: This is Robert’s first year on iGEM, though he has been drifting towards mathematical biology throughout his entire degree. He investigated viral spread within plants, which involved tracking developments in this evolutionary arms race, fawning over the few papers that have explicit equations, and coding agent-based models. Unfortunately, his plot to include secret agents was against iGEM policy. In the rest of his life, he enjoys science comedy, classical music, reading a bit too intensely, and being aggressively interdisciplinary.
Zoë Humphries: Zoë has enjoyed her first year with iGEM, where her time in the Viral Spread subteam has been interesting, thoroughly challenging, and eye-opening. She researched viral transport and plant defense mechanisms, which were infinitely more complex than she realised. Learning about python and agent-based modelling was confusing at first, and then kind of awesome. She hopes to help with western blotting and coordinating all the events. In other parts of her life, she enjoys playing clarinet, rock climbing, singing running, swing dancing, and listening to podcasts (helps her pretend she’s an adult).

Practices

Human practices, policy, and outreach

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.

Advisors

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Dr. Andrew Doxey: Assistant Professor, Biology
Bioinformatics and Protein Modelling
Website
Dr. Barbara Moffatt: Professor, Biology
Plant Development and Lab Techniques
Department Profile
Dr. Brian Ingalls: Associate Professor, Applied Mathematics
Mathematical Modelling and Analysis
Website
Dr. Marc Aucoin: Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering
Genetic Engineering and Viral Expression
Website
Dr. Trevor Charles: Professor, Biology
Microbiology and Genetic Engineering
Department Profile | Twitter

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