Team:MIT/Team

Meet Our Team!

Margaret Zhang is a rising junior in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. She is excited to be a part of this year’s iGEM competition and fully dive into the field of synthetic biology which has emerging applications to therapeutics, agriculture, and the environment. At MIT, Margaret was previously an undergraduate researcher in the White Lab at The Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research where she applied a systems biology approach to elucidate the molecular and cellular response to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and also the Strano Research Group where she developed DNA-wrapped single-walled carbon nanotube nanosensors for heavy metal detection. Furthermore, she was a part of MIT New Engineering Education Transformation Living Machines Thread where she fabricated a non-PDMS microfluidic device that modeled aspects of the human microbiome. Beyond research, she has a love for public health and interned at the Boston Medical Center this past year working for The Autism Program. On campus, she plays cello in the MIT Chamber Music Society and is the New Member Director for her sorority Kappa Alpha Theta.

Melody Wu is a rising sophomore in Biological Engineering at MIT. In 2016, she participated in iGEM as manager of her high school team, Alverno, researching methods to reduce the effects of supercoiling in multi-genetic bacterial circuits. During the semester at MIT, she works in the Housman lab identifying genetic modifiers for Huntington’s. She joined MIT’s 2019 iGEM team because she found it to be a valuable learning experience in 2016. She is further interested in working with a team developing ideas relating to the interdisciplinary connections of bioengineering to various fields and hopes to learn more about mammalian synthetic biology. Outside of the lab, she enjoys creating art to visually explain the jargon of science (but also just for fun), trying new foods from around the world, exploring new places (including Boston which she hopes to do this summer!). She loves thinking about global sustainability and development as part of MIT’s only living-learning community iHouse, and is involved in Terrascope, GlobeMed, Medlingual, and is a Peer Ear.

Ethan Levy is a rising senior at a Miami-Dade high school in an accelerated track for STEM and medicine. After years of science fair experiments on heart disease treatments, he joined iGEM as an opportunity to learn and contribute more to the medical field in the future. Interested in bioengineering and synthetic biology, he hopes to explore the unanswered questions of biology. Inspired by medical drawings, he enjoys combining bioengineering with graphic design. Outside of research he is usually found taking long walks on the beach or playing melodica as well as video games. He is president of his school’s science honor society and enjoys volunteering at his local nursing home, where he goes to patients with his dog, Choco.

Miles George is a rising sophomore at MIT studying Biological Engineering and is minoring in African and African Diaspora Studies. During his high school years, he was enrolled in the science research course for 3 years. Each year, he focused on a different biological model organism: zebrafish, fruit flies, and mice. His mouse study was an extensive epigenetic and behavioral study spanning most of his junior year. Doing research contributed much to his dream of being a biological engineer working in a research lab in the future. One of his goals is to spread scientific awareness to the world and those around him. When he learned about iGEM, he was determined to join the team his freshman year to learn more about the interesting field of synthetic biology. His hobbies include deceitful board games, trivia, and tennis whenever he has the chance to. He is also a part of several groups on campus, including Nu Delta fraternity, The Black Students’ Union, and The Standard.

Vanessa Li is a rising sophomore at Wellesley interested in the intersection of medicine and engineering. Through iGEM, Vanessa hopes to learn about biotechnological techniques and execute laboratory research from design to implementation to presentation. She is also excited about sharing knowledge about synthetic biology and MIT iGEM 2019’s project with the New England community through outreach events. In the MIT D-Lab, Vanessa previously worked with SurgiBox on a compressible HEPA air filter system using origami techniques. Furthermore, she designed a multifunctional earpiece for individuals with compromised aural communication on Earth and on Mars as a part of the Babson-Olin-Wellesley Foundry Fellowship. Outside of iGEM, Vanessa is involved with Wellesley Engineering Society, MIT Hacking Medicine, and Partners in Health (Wellesley Chapter). When not working on awesome projects, she also enjoys dancing with the Wellesley College Dancers, playing the violin as a part of the Chamber Music Society, and traveling around the world with her family and friends.

Gabrielle Ndakwah is a rising sophomore in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. She finds synthetic biology to be incredibly stimulating because of its simultaneous intuitive nature and vast complexity and palpable impact on the world. Gabrielle found her passion for biotechnology from her participation in the Health Occupations and Sciences competitions and is excited to have the opportunity to learn about the entire biotechnological research process from beginning to end through iGEM. Her past experiences in research include a summer spent at UC Berkeley participating in the National Student Leadership Conference program in biotechnology, where she designed and programmed a myoelectric prosthetic arm and learned many lab skills such as gel electrophoresis and PCR. Outside of lab, Gabrielle is involved in improving the MIT experience for students through her positions in her dorm exec and in the Associate Advisor Steering Committee, which aims to better the first-year experience for incoming first years. Gabrielle also dances in MIT’s Dancetroupe, serves MIT’s Black Women’s Alliance as Social Chair, participates in BoSTEM, and spends time with her friends in her free time.

Jessica Knapp is a rising sophomore at MIT who is majoring in Biological Engineering and planning to minor in Statistics and Data Sciences. She is excited to be a part of the MIT iGEM team! Jessica’s first lab experience was in Dr. Bernt’s lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she investigated the connections between histone methylation and Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Jessica ran a drug assay to determine whether inhibiting IDH lowers H3K79 dimethylation and see if the cells had reduced growth rates. She is interested in biostatistics, and would like to do oncology research, as well as teach. At school, she enjoys doing gymnastics with the MIT gymnastics club, performing with the musical theatre guild, and mentoring high schoolers through the Leadership Training Institute. She also enjoys working at Tumblekids Watertown and volunteering with the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Conference.

Maisha M. Prome is a rising junior at MIT majoring in Biological Engineering and minoring in Writing. After discovering her passion for the life sciences in high school, she competed in the International Biology Olympiad for two consecutive years. Synthetic Biology is the perfect intersection between her love for biology and building things and this realization is what led her to join iGEM. Maisha is especially interested in biomaterials and using bioengineering to solve environmental and health issues. Previously, she has done research in MIT’s Soft Active Materials Laboratory to reduce biofouling of reverse osmosis membranes using vibration. As part of the New Engineering Education Transformation - Living Machines program, she has worked on new designs for gut-on-a-chip microfluidic devices to improve them for confocal imaging. Outside of the lab, Maisha is involved with MIT Effective Altruism, copy-edits for The Tech, and enjoys many hobbies including writing, knitting, sketching, and baking.

Ye Cheng Zheng is a rising sophomore at MIT planning to major in Biological Engineering and Computer Science. He had previous experience studying gene regulation in fruit flies and was fascinated by the precise maintenance of spatial and temporal protein gradients during development. As a result, he was interested in learning how to replicate and control gene regulation with genetic engineering, motivating him to join iGEM. He hopes that it will give him the opportunity to learn more about synthetic biology, improve his research skills, and work with students with similar interests. Other than iGEM, he is a member of the Theta Xi fraternity and the MIT Archery club. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, sketching, and cooking.

Malik George is a rising sophomore at MIT majoring in Biological Engineering and planning to minor in African and African Diaspora Studies. In high school, he previously worked with and bred zebrafish, fruit flies, and mice in separate research projects to learn about conditioning and its effect on behavior. Through these years, he gained a deep interest in the relationship between an organism’s genetic makeup and their resulting phenotype. As a result, Malik is very much eager and excited to be a part of the 2019 iGEM team where he can directly study molecular and synthetic biology in a laboratory setting while advancing both his technical and communication skills. Besides iGEM, he is a member of The Standard, the Black Student’s Union, and Nu Delta fraternity. He enjoys playing a wide variety of games with his friends as well as discussing superhero movies and lore.

Kristina Stoyanova is an incoming freshman at Caltech planning to study bioengineering. She is ecstatic to be on the MIT iGEM team for a second year and to spend every day with the thrill of discovering what scientists can accomplish through synthetic biology. After studying molecular biology at the Harvard Summer School, she became involved with iGEM, volunteering at the jamboree in 2017 and joining the MIT team in 2018. Alongside studying and working on science, she relishes being able to teach younger students as the leader of the biology group in her high school’s Science National Honors Society. She has volunteered to give lectures and invigorate students through her passion for biology at HSSP, BoSTEM, and Lab central. Outside of academia, she expresses her creativity through public speaking in the dynamic environment of theater and as captain of her school’s Mock Trial and girl’s tennis teams.

Our Mentors and Advisors!

Ron Weiss is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology. He has been engaged in synthetic biology research since 1996 when he was a graduate student at MIT and where he helped set up a wet-lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. After completion of his PhD, Weiss joined the faculty at Princeton University, and recently returned to MIT to take on a tenured faculty position in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Deepak Mishra is an NSF Graduate Fellow in MIT Biological Engineering and a Ph.D. student in Ron Weiss’ Synthetic Biology Group. Prior to MIT, Deepak earned a B.Sc. in chemical engineering with a biomolecular engineering emphasis at Caltech. Deepak enjoys teaching immensely and has been involved in teaching 3 undergraduate/graduate academic courses, mentored 46 students across 3 iGEM teams to date, and directly supervised several master’s thesis students and undergraduate researchers. His research interests lie in the use of protein-protein interactions within synthetic biology both alone and in concert with other regulatory modalities for sophisticated circuit design.

Nika Shakiba is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Ron Weiss’ Synthetic Biology Group in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her work in synthetic biology uses engineering principles to control the behavior of stem cells through the design, construction, and optimization of decision-making genetic circuits. Nika completed her doctoral training in Dr. Peter Zandstra’s Stem Cell Bioengineering lab at the University of Toronto, where she focused on uncovering the role of heterogeneity and clonal competition in the reprogramming process. Nika has a passion for outreach and mentorship, as a mentor for the MIT 2018 and 2019 iGEM teams, as co-founder of the Canadian national StemCellTalks initiative, as a direct mentor to a number of undergraduate and graduate students, and through other activities.

Jan Lonzaric is a postdoctoral fellow at the Weiss lab of Synthetic Biology and graduated from University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. His research interests span from genetic circuits to protein-protein interactions, with a current focus on RNA encoded circuits. Transferring knowledge to motivated students and participating in team research has always been a great motivation leading Jan to take part in iGEM three times before as both student and mentor, as well as to participate in the Slovenian national project Next Generation of Researchers in Life Sciences.

Shiva Razavi is a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Ron Weiss’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studies how cell-cell communication regulates pattern formation and organogenesis. Shiva studied mechanical engineering at University of Illinois. Intrigued by biology, she later completed her doctoral training at Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering. There, in Dr. Takanari Inoue’s lab she engineered synthetic cell-like vesicles that can sense their chemical environment and subsequently generate spatially-localized membrane forces, a hallmark of directed cell migration. Shiva is passionate about broadening educational reach. At Johns Hopkins she co-founded BME EDGE to expand the extramural training for graduate students. From 2013 to 2018 she mentored female students in engineering and sciences through the U.S. Department of State and the New York Academy of Sciences initiatives.

Maya Levy is a biological engineering student at MIT and an undergraduate research fellow at the Weiss Lab of Synthetic Biology. She spent most of high school researching and publishing on bioinstrumentation for diabetes management. At MIT, she’s worked on manipulating systems of cellular communication for modeling in lab as well as for therapeutics as part of the 2018 iGEM team. Since iGEM was such a great introductory synthetic biology learning experience, she decided to help mentor the 2019 team in the hope that they will also have a valuable and rewarding summer!