Meet our team
The Students - our core team
Alexander Schanne
Alexander is in his 7th semester of his biology bachelor at the University of Zurich. He participated in the Biology Undergraduate Summer School at UZH in 2018 and then took up the task of assembling the first iGEM team the University of Zurich has ever sent to Boston. He is also responsible for all our amazing events and our student association Synbio UZH.
It took two full days of iGEM summer for him to realize he doesn't want to pursue a PhD in the lab, so instead he's become very good at managing the team and delegating work. Nowadays, he tends to disappear behind the computer, and after a couple of hours comes back out with gleaming eyes and new ideas, be it for the lab, human practices, or collaborations.
He'd never admit to being this excitable though, except maybe when he gets to enlighten us about chilies or creates another funny meme.
Lynn Hasenöhrl
Lynn is in her 5th semester of her biology bachelor at the University of Zurich. She did a 5 month internship at ETH prior to starting her studies and has been very excitable about biology ever since.
According to Lynn, she is more of a quiet person. The team, however, has still not seen this side of her. Her excitability makes her not only the perfect lab partner but also the team motivator who regularly convinces her team mates to go to pubquiz or to hold movie nights. Even though she is very responsible, she quickly realised that checking the protocol 10x still doesn’t guarantee a successful experiment (sadly).
And if you ever wonder about the names of our parts and lab utensils - you can be sure they are the result of Lynn’s questionable creativity.
Alexandra Marti
Alexandra is in her 5th semester of her biomedicine bachelor at the University of Zurich. She's looking forward to spending the next 3 months at the John Innes Centre in Norwich where she'll be doing a biochemistry internship.
For a very long time, Alexandra was able to uphold the image of THE team mom, be it through bringing food or through keeping everything organized. (Her downfall will not be discussed here) She‘s the one making our work possible, be it through providing us with her beautifully constructed primers, through coaxing out money from so many supportive sponsors or through making beautiful plates for our bacteria (they get the most loving homes from her!).
As a rule, she only treats herself with croissants on tough days - what used to be a monthly occurrence has now become a habit though.
Roy Hove
Roy is in his 5th semester of his biomedicine bachelor at the University of Zurich. He did a research internship at a systems biology lab in summer 2018 - coincidentally the exact same lab as the one we're doing our project in!
To be honest, there is one main thing that needs to be mentioned here: Roy's magic hands. With them, he made transformations work that weren't supposed to be possible. One could definitely not say that Roy did not have enough ideas for how to improve the protocols or for possible sidetracks to our project.
Partially due to his completly different sleep cycle and partially due to his ambitious nature, he is the current champion for staying in the lab the longest - which, if I may mention for future teams, is NOT a goal worth pursuing.
Our supervisors
We were generously hosted by the Pelkmans Lab and we would like to thank the whole team for welcoming us with open arms. We would especially like to thank Professor Lucas Pelkmans for his enthusiasm towards iGEM and our project. Additionally, we would also like to thank our supervisor Dr. Arpan Kumar Rai and our Advisor Adrian Tschan for all their support.
Principal Investigator - Prof. Lucas Pelkmans
When we first approached Lucas about iGEM, within 2 hours he had replied to our email with "I would be very happy to help". When Alexander read the response, he was sure we would get together a team. Although Lucas is, as every Professor, very busy we had plenty of time to discuss our project with him. He had great ideas in the beginning that helped us to choose an iGEM project.
Instructor/Head Coach - Dr. Arpan Kumar Rai
Arpan was the perfect instructor for our team, thanks to being the post-doc with the most experience in the lab and to his willingness to keep learning about new fields of research.
You know how some people say "google it" when you don't know something? Let me propose an alternative: Ask Arpan. For the duration of our project, this sentence has been said by our team approximately 385 times and to our amazement, he has not given up on us yet (at least he doesn't show it). We would like to thank him most sincerely for sharing his knowledge from in and beyond the lab and for having so much patience with us!
Advisor - Adrian Tschan
Adrian worked with the phage 201 phi 2-1 on his Master thesis. He saved us a lot of time and tears by providing us with plasmids suitable for P. chlororaphis, as well as all protocols involving phage propagation and infection.