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Team:Berkeley/Team
From 2013.igem.org
Bernardo Cervantes is a final year Bioengineering major enticed by the sheer comfort and joy of being in lab for unspeakable hours. His work revolved around finding many of the GTs we tested by building cDNA libraries from plants and he has since mastered all flavors of PCR. He was also involved with putting together our presentation. He is perhaps most remembered as the napkin fairy, keeping everyone of us perfectly stocked with paper towels.
Hojae Lee is a 3rd year bioengineering major with previous experience working with nanodevices and biomedicine. She decided to pursue iGEM for the immersive experience - which she definitely received. Her wetlab work consisted of manipulating yeast systems for further application of our indigo pathway. Most importantly, Hojae did the most work on our economic and environmental analysis, deciphering the art of chemical process design. Hojae was the mastermind behind this wiki as well as the illustrator expert in our group, and given the location of her bench secluded from the rest of ours, she was best remembered for not always being remembered.
Roy Park began his 2nd year in the Bioengineering major this year. He performed almost all the experiments relating to quantifying our indigo production and also worked on characterizing the kinetic parameters of the enzymes we used in our indigo biosynthesis pathway. He was also quickest to help any of our team whenever we needed help (as long as it didn't involve sonication in the cold room). Though current evidence suggests Roy is a sophomore, he will remain a freshman forever in our hearts.
Ramya Prathuri is a 4th year bioengineering student known best for her impeccable taste in expensive pipettes. In wetlab, she worked predominantly on isolating and characterizing several of the glucosyl transferases we tested, and she also made our BioBrick parts for the Registry. Ramya played a role in creating our poster, presentation, and most of the written content for our material. She specializes in eating Thai food, throwing used centrifuge tubes into distally located waste bins, and never submitting sequencing on time.
Thomas Rich aka 'Sir Thomas' is in his final semester of Bioengineering at Berkeley. He was focused on mutagenizing some of our GTs to expand their substrate specificity and working on potential applications for our indigo biosynthesis pathway in yeast. He also figured out how the outdated and confusing wiki's from earlier years actually worked, and set about restyling our own. Thomas aspires to use his iGEM experience to help him think outside the box in all of life's applications, and eventually, become a high school teacher. Most notably, Thomas' facial hair grows at a most rapid pace, engulfing his face a mere week after shaving.
Zachary Russ is a 3rd year graduate student in the Dueber Lab tasked with guiding our team down the path of science. He helped us define many of our research objectives and troubleshoot many of our assays. In particular, Zach experimented with indigo production in yeast which could broaden the applications for our current biosynthesis pathway. His most prized skills include his ability to pun his way through any conversation and consume vast quantities of tangerine juice.
Christopher Eiben, another iGEM mentor, is a 2nd year Bioengineering graduate student from the Keasling Lab. His protein engineering experience with FoldIt was extremely useful in helping us better model our GTs and hypothesize Glu activity. When together, Chris and Zach deliver a formidable onslaught of puns that both awe us and make us contemplate dropping out of iGEM.
Terry has a master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT and is currently teaching bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He hopes that by doing so, he will be giving students the tools that they will need to repair him when he gets older.
An Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley and a principle investigator of the Energy Biosciences Institute, John is our fearless leader.
