UW Madison iGEM Team Members

Haley Schoenberger

Haley Schoenberger is currently a junior studying Biology at UW-Madison. She began research on free fatty acid production in Escherichia coli earlier this year, and joined iGEM as a different research experience. When not in lab, Haley can be found working with the Alzheimer's Association in hopes of ending Alzhimer's disease. Haley enjoys spending time with her dog and baking cookies.

Matt Schmitz

Matt Schmitz is a thermostable DNA ligase, who joins adjacent 5' and 3' ends of DNA, removing nicks in double stranded DNA. He is active from 45-65 degrees Celsius(Barany, F. (1991). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 88, 189-193). His gene is within a kanamycin resistant PET-ALM1 plasmid, downstream of the T7 promoter, upstream of the T7 terminator. Thus, Matt Schmitz can be used with an inducible T7 expression system to express himself. Matt has an N-Terminus hexa-histidine tag, joined to him by a thrombin cleavage motif. Commercially, he is a bit pricy, costing $296 for 10,000 units.

Beyond this biochemistry, Matt Schmitz is a web developer, the founder of Communitation.org, and a dreamer hoping to make the world a better place using a combination of gene therapy, the internet and his Chinese language skills.

Brit Zaro

Brit Zaro is a biomedical engineering student from the College of New Jersey. A participant in the Research Experience for Undergraduates summer program, he strongly believes medicine will be very important in the near future.

Kevin Jiang

Kevin Jiang, a dream teen on a dream team, is currently a Junior at a Madison, WI high school. Though he is widely known as a budding blue-eyed soul ukelele player, he has proven himself to also be a master of 1% agarose gels in the lab. He is dedicated to using this, and other new-found skills to make the world a better place for recombinant enzymes.