Team:DTU-Denmark/Attributions

Attributions

Moritz Przybilla

Driven by his passion for science and medicine Moritz started studying Molecular Biotechnology in Heidelberg with the intention to make his own contribution to the development of a HIV/AIDS cure. He is a very optimistic person with great dreams, who knows exactly what he wants.
Besides his excellent lab work skills, which he acquired during his bachelor thesis about epitope prediction in colorectal cancer and various internships, he is the one who managed the sponsoring almost by his own. With his irresistible charisma and charm and his ability to produce many convincing texts in a short time he saved us the financial support of companies and foundations.
As a valuable member of the wet lab team he took care of the numerous toolbox parts, handled the mutagenesis experiments and a lot more. He is not deterred from taking responsibility for tasks he is not familiar with as he possesses a high degree of self-initiative and can adjust quickly to his new projects. Moritz has a talent for organization and communication. He loves heated discussions and is not afraid to passionately fight for his opinion even if he is outnumbered.
Working with him as lab buddy was always a lot of fun, he uses the funniest phrases I have ever heard (I swear half of them don’t really exist) and when you hear schmaltzy love songs you know our romanticist Moritz is already in the lab. But watch out when Moritz performs transformations and has an ice bucket. It might happen that he surprises you with a hand full of ice in your neck.
By participating in iGEM he wants to “put the cherry on the icing of his bachelor degree” and I couldn’t imagine Team Heidelberg without him.

Catharina Gandor

When you first meet the iGEM Team Heidelberg, you might directly recognize Catharina Leila Angeles Gandor (yes, this is her full name ;) ), always with a smile on her face. Cathy, or "the mother of phages" (editor´s note: Game of Thrones episodes every monday in our breaks!) is one of our most positive and enthusiastic team members, managing the tremendously challenging task to write her bachelor thesis on human papilloma virus induced cancer and participating in iGEM simultaneously. As if that were not enough, she started her medicine studies in October - bedtimes? Are you kidding me?! As our most profiled phage expert, she is the reason for all our blue plaque assays, establishing a protocol which makes it even for the author of this text possible, to do reliable phage tests. Talking about her contribution to our project, you cannot miss her colourful festivals in our incubator - the Opto-PACE project. Developing the most beautiful part of our toolbox, Catharina accomplished the acquisition of many cloning methods like Golden gate assembly and the handling of Geneious all by herself or at least with a little help!
For all of you who did not get the point yet: Cathy is one of our most important team members, always friendly, helpful and ready to discuss, debate and sometimes dispute about diverse aspects of our project.
To cut things short: We are very happy to have you with us Cathy!

Jan Mathony

Jan as one of the oldest in our team is definitely one of the most experienced members in the wet-lab as well. He always had time to give less experienced members a helping hand or provided useful advice. His substantial skills in Geneious have been quite beneficial for the team as in silico design can be tricky sometimes ;) Besides his expertise, he spreads his kind and loveable sarcasm and by doing so he supported the team a lot. Although he was involved in several subprojects, Jan was one of the driving forces of the general organization and project planning.
As mentioned before, he was involved in many subprojects, but spent most of the time on working enthusiastically on PI-PACE, the-ß Lactamase and ß-Galactosidase assay, writing the RFC, and a lot of cloning work.
Apart from iGEM Jan is a second year Master student of Molecular Biosciences, who loves American Football and does not get tired of explaining the rules over and over again. With his innumerous skills and his inexhaustible positive attitude even during tough times Jan was indispensable to our team and we are glad to call him a team member.

Lukas Adam

Lukas alias Mr. Wiki himself, is the man behind our fabulous and sparkling Wiki. He is always a step ahead of all the others when it comes to wiki related topics. In a rush of a complete distraught he always urges us to “get our texts done as soon as possible” and never stops complaining about the “small” design related wishes we assign to him. He is kind of addicted to caffeine, though his doctor wants him to stop but he cannot refuse a Coca-Cola a day. Despite his tremendous qualities in wiki design he is also the one who was responsible for the idea of a riboswitch-guided PACE design known as the Theo-PACE.

Marita Klein

As the only person in our team that could do a handstand while pipetting a PCR, Marita is the most athletic team member. Besides that she was definitely the most enthusiastic team member, even being cheerful when she had to do a huge amount of plaque assays. As being responsible for one of our key projects, Marita had to spend many late evenings in the lab. No one knows how she managed pushing forward her projects, writing texts for our wiki, discussing human practices and dancing through the lab all at the same time. The longer the project proceeded and the higher the number of plaque assays and phage propagations became, the more she strengthened her supremacy over DNA and proteins. Although, Marita had by far the lowest caffeine consume in our team (coffee and coke are for beginners) she was the one who fed caffeine and theophylline to her E. coli, making sure they were all awake and ready to perform.
But Marita was not only respected and appreciated by her E. coli, but also by the whole team. She had an open ear for everyone who was stressed or "depressed" after weeks of hard work and thereby she was one of the main reasons for the good working atmosphere in our lab. Every iGEM team should have a Marita in its ranks.

Julius Upmeier zu Belzen

Like the polymaths of old greece, Julius is able to grasp new concepts in the blink of an eye and immediately contribute on high levels. While he is a genuine theoretician preferring clean and sterile environments over the wetlab mess, he never hesitates to take action. Whether he's involved in the assembly of the PACE-device or just helping out in the lab, he does it with a smile. But as real world phages are discrete and the disambiguities and uncertainties of the wetlab are quite annoying to him, the lover of the determined world commited himself to modeling and software where he contributed greatly to our results. When he isn't busy coding or feeding himself with immeasurable amounts of coke and skittles, Julius is always down for a good laugh.

Max Schwendemann

Max is a first-year bachelor student in Molecular Biotechnology. Besides his unorthodox singing, he has a favor for short dancing sessions in the lab. Although he just started studying, he already had lots of lab experiences. Max was one of the people in the wet lab, who worked the hardest - almost all day and night! He is our PREDCEL expert and takes care of the protein interaction experiments. On top, he is the mastermind behind our fabulous video and many design ideas are based on his creative ideas. Max is fondly called our nighthawk, because you can say "good night" when you arrive in the lab in the morning hours. We are lucky to call Max a team mate and hope he can make up for the lack of sleep after the Giant Jamboree.

Thore Bürgel

Thore, the mastermind behind DeeProtein, sometimes seems to miss lab work as he can be seen standing most of the time while he is programming. He has the great ability to improve the mood in the lab even if that means short-term productivity decreases. Luckily for the software team he decided to focus on the bioinformatics behind our project. He contributed thousands lines of code and produced terabytes of the finest data.
Thore is also the guy with the second worst possible taste in pizza toppings (spinach and egg, worst would be pineapple). He is always entertaining the team with a best-of-its-kind selection of project-related memes. Unbelievable for the rest of the team, he maintained some kind of day and night rhythm, which may be connected to him surpassing human performance in drinking the strongest espressi possible.

Pauline Pfuderer

Just starting the third semester in Molecular Biotechnology, Pauline decided to be part of our team. Whether it is about considering cloning strategies, caring about our collaborations, talking to scientists, organize our Human Practices or staying in the lab until late night – as a true all-rounder Pauline combines it all . As Pauline is quite smart, very reliable and always in a good mood, except if hungry, she definitely was one team member, we could not have missed. Although she cared about lots of different tasks she kept her great sense for humor and thereby helped a lot brightening our mood when lab work got though occasionally. She is also the person behind our PCR-Doctor-proposal offering help to other teams when they are struggling with PCRs and other cloning issues. Besides iGEM Pauline is a real gourmet that likes meeting friends in restaurants and bars located in Heidelberg’s beautiful old town.

Lukas Platz

Lukas Platz or the old-established of our team has all qualifications you need. He is not only one of the most experienced wet-lab persons in our team, but he also joined iGEM once before making him and his experiences indispensable for us. Having studied Biochemistry, he always challenges the most complex synthesis with a fable for explosives, highly toxic substances and possibly all other stuff harming you. He describes himself as "relaxed and unagitated", but is by far the only one able to manage organosilicon synthesis, transformations, cloning and writing on Facebook at the same time. In his free time, he plays the guitar, spends time with his friends or eats too much Pizza Hawaii (as the author of this text suggests that this is ridiculous as fruits do not belong on a pizza). He is a really funny guy and we are very happy to have him.

Instructors

Christopher Workman
The one who made everything happen.

Kyle Rothschild-Mancinelli
Contact person for most of the questions we had in the lab and so much more.

Mycolab

Fabiano Jares
PhD in Bioengineering. Provided the protocol for protoplastation and transformation for Aspergillus.

Skyttegården
Provided hay for free to be used as a substrate.

Skyttegården
Provided hay for free to be used as a substrate.

Ecovative


Mycoworks


Timothy Hobley
DTU Brewery. Provided spent brewing grains to be used as a substrate.

Human Practices

High school team

Rasmus Ibsen Dehli
Head of Biotech Academy. Primary contact in Biotech academy. Helps in organizing the team.

Anne Sofie Dyerberg
Head of Biotech Academy. Helps in organizing the team.

Philip Hau Sørensen
Biobuilders 2017. Co-organiser together with Biobuilders 2018.

Janet Standeven, Lambert iGEM.
Helped with answers to how a successful high school iGEM team can be organised and managed. In the high school project, multiple teachers and coordinators have helped us inform the project.

Morten Eskildsen
Teacher from Birkerød Gymnasium

Nicolai Bogø Stabell
Science teacher from HCØ Lyngby

Charlotte Hofman-Bang
Science coordinator from HCØ Lyngby

Mårten Flø Jørgensen
Talent coordinator from Bagsværd Kostskole og Gymnasium

Bo Kristensen
Science teacher from Sukkertoppen Gymnasium

Pernille Højen
Talent coordinator from Sukkertoppen Gymnasium

Lisa Tobiesen
Talent coordinator from Nærum Gymnasium

Dorte Kühnau
Science teacher from Virum Gymnasium

Birgit Riedel Langvad
Vice principal from Virum Gymnasium

Elementary School talks

Dmitrij Getman
Teacher from st. Magleby skole. Contacted us with regards to the talks. Helped design the focus of the talk.

Collab with KU and Exeter

Matthew Romang
Exeter 2018. Head of HP collab at Exeter.

Victoria Sværke Rasmussen
KU 2018. Head of HP collab at KU.

Michael Linden-Vørnle
Astrophysicist and Chief Consultant at DTU Space. Helped shape the DTU part of the collaboration.

Ecovative

Eben Bayer, CEO
Helped with aligning the project with industry demands.

Damen Schaak
Project lead.

Jen Towne
Coordinates meetings with Eben and Damen.

Misc. scientists

Jens Frisvad
Fungal researcher at DTU. Helped with picking the right species of fungi for testing.

Mikako Sasa
Researcher at Novozymes. Helped with direction of the project.

Sara Landwik
Researcher at Novozymes. Helped with the direction of the project.