Hello! My name is Susan and I am a third year at UCSF in the Tetrad program. I grew up in the east bay area and stayed around to study biochemistry and bioengineering at UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). During my time at Cal, I discovered academic research, more specifically synthetic biology, and became very interested in harvesting the power of biology for useful applications. Spurred by that interest, I joined the 2009 Berkeley iGEM team to work on bacterial surface display, and from there I became inspired to one day TA iGEM, contributing to this rich experience for students and just getting plain old excited for novel synthetic biology research.

Ben is assisting the IGEM team with computational tools. He is a PhD student in Bioinformatics, and a member of the UCSF center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. He grew up in Kings Beach, Ca and graduated from North Tahoe High School, and afterwards attended the US Naval Academy, where he studied mathematics. He also holds an MSc in Applied and Computational Mathematics from the University of Oxford. He spent several years as a Surface Wafare Officer in the US Navy including a tour as a mathematics instructor at the Naval Academy.

I'm Graham, a third year Bioinformatics PhD student here at UCSF. After doing iGEM as an undergrad at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign... twice, I figured I wasn't quite done yet. So now I help with the computational aspects of the team's project. I think iGEM is a pretty cool opportunity. Here at UCSF where we have a team mainly comprised of high school students and it's particularly exciting for this to be their first exposure to hands on, technical science.

Greg is a third year Bioinformatics student at UCSF. He went to Michigan State University for undergrad and studied Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. While there he worked in a plant biochemistry lab. After undergrad, he worked for a few years researching plant genetics. He also helped with the iGEM Jamboree in 2009. This year he is helping mostly with wet lab experiments and analysis.

Anusuya is a third year Bioengineering Ph.D. student in the UCSF/UC Berkeley joint program, where she works at the nexus of tissue engineering, biomaterials and synthetic biology. She has an undergraduate degree in Biomechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Having participated in iGEM twice as an undergrad at Stanford - once as team member and once as a mentor - she couldn't help but get involved with iGEM as a graduate student. Mentoring the UCSF team, which has a unique mix of high school and undergraduate members, has been an enriching and rewarding experience. Anusuya has been really impressed with the progress of this year's team and can't wait to see the impact of their work at the Jamboree and beyond!

Thomas is a graduate student in Biophysics at UCSF. He worked on the iGEM team at Washington University in St. Louis in 2009, optimizing light harvesting in the photosynthetic bacterium R. sphaeroides. He is enjoying revisiting iGEM in his first mentorship role, helping students collect and analyze gene expression data.

Matt is assisting the iGEM team with microscopy tools and synthetic biology backround. Matt graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2010, receiving a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering. At JHU, he participated in Dr. Jef Boeke's Build-A-Genome project, synthesizing a functional designer eukaryotic chromosome. Currently, Matt is a PhD student in the joint UCSF/UCB program in Bioengineering. He investigates the role of epithelial cell dimensionality and membrane protein dynamics in the context of cancer invasion and metastasis. Matt is excited to teach the next generation of bioengineers and synthetic biologists through iGEM at UCSF!