Team:Newcastle/Team

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Students

Vincent Leonardo

Vincent is amazing, he radiates positivity and he has a black belt at being good in everything from cooking delicious food to excellent lab skills. Also, Vincent is like a "Wikipedia of genetics", if anyone has a question about it, he is the person who will give great advice about it. In his free time Vincent gives brilliant piano lessons, and plays it beautifully himself, also dreams of being a GREAT king in the future. Furthermore, he has an amazing 30 pairs of shoes collection, which would be enough for 3 iGEM teams! Recently, during iGEM, Vincent become proud and loving father of Betty and Berty (the first L-forms he grew on a streak plate).

James King

If you need help modelling, James is the guy you need to talk to. James is a second year Geneticist who hopes to work in bioinformatics in the future. This chirpy chappy has a passion for cooking and has treated certain iGEMers to his delectable risotto. When not working on iGEM or cooking fabulous food you will find James at the university squash courts with friends.

Yana Dem'yanenko

A trampolining, opera-watching, guitar-and-sometimes-piano-playing, dangerous-cyclling, wine-drinking, cheese-eating, gourmet chef – Yana also sometimes works on iGEM.

Matthew Law

As one of the two computer scientists on the team, Matt has been vital to the design and production of our wiki. Matt has also cheerfully immersed himself in the labwork. Matts main computing interests are game design and bio-informatics. Outside academia, Matt enjoys playing and coaching basketball and is president of the University basketball club.

Vivian Wong

Details about Viv go here

Christopher Wall

One of the more experienced members of the team, Chris' extensive lab skills and resourcefulness have made him the first person other members turn to when an experiment goes wrong or a protocal needs adjusting. Found in the lab at weekends and late into the night, Chris' enthusiasm and maturity have enabled him to successfully juggle iGEM with the end of his Masters project. When not in the lab, Chris can be found playing, watching and even simulating football, and is also something of a movie aficionado

Justas Miknys

Justas is one of our computer scientists in the team and provides a lot of help with the computing and modelling parts of our project. Even though he doesn’t have much background in biology, he tries his best to help us all the time. Justas has a signature laugh which cheers everyone up after a long day. Throughout the day, he also likes to share haribos and cookies with everyone on the team to keep everyone full. If you see Justas really tired in the morning, it’s probably because he has been up at night playing poker. Justas suggested that our iGEM team be called Newcastle Mafia. This name was luckily voted out but he was devastated.

Alina Tamciuc

Alina is our only architect in the team but has thrown herself into the lab work with lots of enthusiasm. Her strengths are in her strong eye for design (as seen in the team logo), her straight talking attitude and supportive and friendly nature. She also enjoys hikes, cheese, wine, watching Miss Marple, cherry tea, trips to the cinema and photography.

Robert McKiernan

Rob can often be seen rapidly skateboarding to Uni in his beanie hat and funky T-shirt in fear of being late. His sociable, friendly, approachable, funny bearded face can always be seen in the lab.

In his stressed state, PLEASE feed him chocolate in order to return him to his normal relaxed state.

Isabelle McLaren

Izzy rhymes with cheesy and easy, but one couldn’t be more wrong here! She prefers cheese and wine to tea and cake, and we don’t blame her. She’s sweet enough to sugar a dozen cakes, while adding a bit of zest for the flavour!

Izzy’s the life of every party. Thanks to her no one can ever forget it’s Friday!

Geoffrey Pettitt

A softly spoken, contemplative chap, Geoff brings a more reflective quality to the team. his flexibility has allowed seamless movement between themes, with Geoff equally comfortable growing and experimenting on his plants or modelling the L-forms growing in them. A keen hiker, he is the vice-president of the university's fellwalking society.

Supervisors and Advisors

Dr. Paolo Zuliani

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University. My current research area is verification of biological and cyber-physical systems via model checking. I work with Anil Wipat and his group at the Center for Bacterial Cell Biology, in particular for verifying synthetic biology designs. Earlier, I worked with Edmund M. Clarke at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was the Technical Coordinator of CMACS. I am also interested in quantum and reversible programming languages, and formal methods for specifying and deriving code (a la Dijkstra) for quantum algorithms. For information visit: [http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/paolo.zuliani Dr. Paolo Zuliani].

Dr. Wendy Smith

I am a research associate based in our wet lab in the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology, Newcastle University. I studied Medical Microbiology at Newcastle University and my PhD was analysing functional genomics of group A streptococcal virulence factors. My initial research involved investigating the mechanisms of pathogenicity utilized by the Gram positive bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes. This experience equipped me with considerable expertise in the physiology/molecular biology of Gram-positive bacteria. I first encountered the concept of synthetic biology (at local seminars) in the context of a Gram-positive bacterium (Bacillus subtilis) and my interest stemmed initially from recognizing that this was a completely new and ‘exciting’ area, where I could make a valuable contribution exploiting my existing expertise. I have now extended my interests into the field of synthetic biology and am specifically researching into synthetic quorum peptide mediated communication systems in Bacillus subtilis.

Sungshic Park

I am a PhD student in synthetic biology. At crossroads between molecular biology and engineering, synthetic biology is a science trying to crack the code of life by building it. I want to understand how DNA governs many facets of biological life forms from microscopic regulations at the cellular level to such macroscopic phenomena as senescence, cancer, intelligence and self-awareness. I want to pursue research on building cellular machineries that can perform “simple” defined tasks. Ultimately, I want to design a framework genome that would serve as a platform for programming microbes or cellular machines. In fact, building such a synthetic genome is a reality still far into the future. Currently, I am set out for an interim research goal: given a mathematical model of a synthetic genetic circuit, determine the what and how of in vivo measurements in terms of resolving discrepancies between the model and the world. This research calls for other enabling studies such as microfluidics, molecular quantification and directed evolution. I have background both in computing and biochemistry. I have worked on various projects involving robotics, artificial intelligence, process control, neural cell recording, animal behaviour measurement and molecular biology. Some of the species worked on include UNIX posix, Linux ubuntu, MacOS leopard, Windows seven, Rattus norvegicus (rodent), Macaca radiata (macaque), Escherichia coli, Clostridium difficile and Bacillus subtilis.

Dr. Ling Juan Wu

Details about Dr. Ling Juan Wu go here

Owen Gilfellon

1st year PhD student, studying Computer Intelligence applied to the engineering of Bacillus subtilis, in association with Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Current Synthetic Biology designs are generally small scale and produced manually, using large amounts of specific domain knowledge. The development of automated computational tools that utilise Computer Intelligence has the potential to extend the scale of possible designs, providing the framework for genome-scale engineering. Work on the automated design of simple devices will be the basis for research into the full or partial automation of the full Synthetic Biology process. Important to this will be investigating the role of programming languages in defining high-level design specifications, how they can best abstract the complexity of the underlying biology, and how they can usefully incorporate computer intelligence algorithms and representations of genetic parts.

Sarah Shapiro

Details about Sarah Shapiro go here

Advisor#3

Name