Meet our team
The Students - our core team
Alexander Schanne
Our team captain Alexander Schanne aka Captain Gel! Alexander is studying biology in his bachelor’s and initiated our team. Whenever he is not preparing a gel, he loves to enlighten us about chilies or creates another funny meme. He is also responsible for all our amazing events, our student association Synbio UZH and to get Lynn down to earth again when she lets her imagination run (a little bit too) wild.
Lynn Hasenöhrl
Our Lab organiser Lynn Hasenöhrl aka PCR queen! Lynn is studying biology in her bachelor’s and definitively the most creative one of our team. Besides rocking the PCR’s, she is always up for giving our parts imaginative names or motivates us to go to the pub quiz night (we’re still unsure whether she wants to go because of the trivia or the guinness though). If you ever want to make friends with her, just show her a picture of sheldon the tiny dinosaur and she will like you in no time.
Alexandra Marti
Alexandra is responsible for PR. She is studying biomedicine in her bachelor’s and if anyone deserves the title „Team Mom“, it’s her! She‘s the one making our work possible, be it through providing us with her beautifully constructed primers for our perfectly working PCR (as you‘ve seen in our memes), through coaxing out money from so many supportive sponsors or through offering snacks!
Roy Hove
Roy is our Project coordinator Roy Hove aka Transformation knight! T-Knight is one of our biomed students and (as we found out recently) a talented and passionate photographer. Whenever he is in the lab (and not in Poland, at the Montreux Jazz festival or sleeping in), he’s trying out a sidetrack or pimping out our bacteria and giving them new shiny plasmids. He is also the one organising our trip to the Giant Jamboree which we are all looking forward to!
Jatina Schumacher
Jatina is currently working on her Master Thesis in Biochemistry and supports us in the creation of a new web design.
Our supervisors
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
Being the post-doc with the most experience in the lab in addition to his willingness to learn about research with phages from scratch made Arpan the perfect instructor for our team.
Advisor - Adrian Tschan
Adrian worked with the phage 201 phi 2-1 on his Master thesis. He save us a lot of time by providing us with plasmids suitable for P. chlororaphis, as well as all protocols involving phage propagation and infection.