Advisors

• Dr. Tom Richard
• Dr. Howard Salis
• Dr. Charlie Anderson
• Jyotsna Lavanya
• Thomas McCarthy
• Nikki Kapp

Undergrad Team

• Casey Hall: "Col. Hall"
• Kevin Thyne: "Lt.Col. Thyne"
• Samuel Ewell: "da best"
• Michael Easterbrook: "Gym leader EasterBrock"
• Andres Carbonell: "lost in dance"
• Laura Hoover: "da Hoover Dam"
• Lars Berg: "Our ethical center"
• Stephanie Everhart: "shutup steph -___-"
• Nayab Gill: "Jasmine"
• Michael Stokes: "Stokes"
• Philip Cygan: "Chlorophil"

Casey’s passion for agriculture has led her to pursuing a major in Biological Engineering with a Food and Biological Engineering Emphasis. She is currently in her junior year and after college, she desires to attend graduate school focusing on production agriculture and genetically modified plants. It has always been her dream to help feed the world and iGEM provided a great opportunity for her to see what genetic modification is all about. Casey was our team lead this year and has also worked specifically with the CesA project from start to finish as well as the plant promoter project design and wet lab procedures. Outside of iGEM, Casey enjoys hunting, fishing, and spending time in the great outdoors.

Kevin is a senior in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. He joined iGEM for the opportunity to work in a lab and do new, exciting research. He worked on last year’s iGEM project and enjoyed it so much that he’s back for more! Kevin definitely adds experience and eons of knowledge to the team and is the go-to person when anyone has questions. When he’s not being a wealth of knowledge, he is involved in the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS).

Sam just finished his third year of Biomedical Engineering at Penn State. His studies have focused on human biology, so iGEM has been a good opportunity for him to explore plant biology as well. During the summer he helped with the website and the butanol project, but his main focus was running our plant nursery. In order to test all these different ideas we needed a small army of plants and he made sure they grew up to be strong little soldiers. When not studying or caring for plants, he enjoys being the best.

Michael is a Penn State junior, studying Chemical Engineering with intended minors in Entrepreneurship and Molecular Biology. He has had a passion to work with genetic engineering since high school and he has been involved in genetics research since his freshman year of college. iGEM was an exciting next step for developing his skills in synthetic biology research. He was heavily involved with the design and construction of the cellulose synthase, cas9, and plant promoter projects. He also learned html/CSS this summer and was responsible for a majority of the coding for the team wiki. In his free time, he enjoys discussing philosophy, playing soccer, playing video games, and visiting family and friends.