TEAM
Our team was founded in the middle of 2015 and it is made up of 10 students of the Biomedical Engineering degree of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra who are really fond of science. As the interests of each member of our group vary from Engineering to Biology and Medicine, we form a highly interdisciplinary team capable of facing all the challenges of this project. We have acquired all the technologic and biologic knowledge and tools necessary with the practices developed during the degree and in the internships that each of us has done in important institutions such as: the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) of the UPF, the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) or the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL).
We are not only fond of science but also willing to help society. We strongly believe we can really make a change. Our attitude and permanent insistence were the key elements which made our university teachers allow us to start this project.
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As the majority of her comrades, she picked up the project without much actual knowledge about working in the lab. However, that did not prevent her from acquiring very fast the skills and actually became one of the people that spent more time surrounded by pipettes, jars of LB and lots of (really, lots of) Eppendorf’s and plates. She also has been very successful at directing and managing the team, as she was in charge of doing all the crazy paperwork that funding a company requires. Her joyful spirit also has created a perfect environment for teamwork, and her house has recently become the unofficial headquarters of our team where, as I write this, the wiki is being typed at unbelievable speeds. |
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If we are to thank anyone for having achieved all this, he should be the first one. Back in 2014, he proposed the idea of starting the first iGEM team of our university and the second in our city since the first edition of the competition. He tricked the minds of some of his classroom mates and gathered a raid of 10 people (more than 25% of the class) to carry it out. Besides his obvious entrepreneurship skills, he has actively participated in the funding of our company, the development of our website and wiki, and, of course, invested a lot of hours in the lab going through quite a lot of coli hardships. Some say that, during his spare time, he has been developing a plan for world domination involving an army of highly trained monkeys. |
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She joined iGEM because she was willing to start her own project with her classmates. She thought iGEM could be a great way to learn more about the scientific world and at the same time spend the summer with good company. She is particularly interested in medicine and she was the one who pushed their colleagues to undertake a project related to this field. She truly believes that with effort one can always make a difference, and she works hard to achieve it. |
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Born in Barcelona (1995), at age 18 he decided to enter at the degreee of biomedical engineering, from which he found iGEM. It was a difficult time for the commitment implied decision but the experience and scope of the project led him to embark on this adventure.He expects the Giant Jamboree to be an unforgettable experience, the best is yet to come. He always says that the best things in life are those that are not planned but just happen, that's why he has not thought about his future yet, but in any case he believes that you have to like what you do for it to be worth it |
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Tricked into iGEM, he ended up enjoying the experience quite a bit, even though he seldom stepped in the lab, preferring instead to lurk in the shadows programing models in python. He may still not know how to set up a miniprep, but at least his programs don’t crash on startup anymore. Not as often anyways. |
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A true genius at math, medical imaging, physiology and pathology, programming, project management… what is she doing in the iGEM team? Well, thanks god that we have her because she is one of the people that worked hardest in the project. Her unique skills at organization and her rigorous and constant work even during the hardest moments have made these last 12 months infinitely easier. Between clonings and minipreps, we have spent really enjoyable moments with her commenting on movies, animes and mangas, or even drawing our favorite characters in the whiteboard of the lab. Also a very kakkoii person too. |
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Willy joined iGEM eager of facing new challenges. As he once said: “He is of the ones that enjoys looking for solutions to apparently really difficult questions”. Since he was one of the team members with more lab experience, he worked a lot in writing the protocols and designing some of the experiments in the lab. He has also been the soul of the lab making jokes and lifting people’s spirit untiringly. He loves going to a sushi buffet in Barcelona which is right now our sacred temple. |
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Elected spokeswoman of the team for her leadership skills, she has been a key member all the way to the very end of the journey. Her determination to get as far as possible and interest for the project have inspired us all to keep working restlessly even during the hardest times. Her vast theoretical research, mathematical models, presentation skills and ability to spam the inbox of hundreds of researchers simultaneously have demonstrated to be unmatched, and have been a key factor for the success of the project. Next January, she will be travelling to Cambridge University to end her career, and then she already has an appointment in the United States to fulfill her ambition of working with the top stem cell research laboratories worldwide |
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Núria joined iGEM driven by her passion for science and maths. Although she spent all summer in the lab, she enjoyed learning new laboratory stuff, modeling polyamine pathways, and in particular, finding solutions for every problem she had to face during this challenging experience. Being social and loving to speak in front of people, she is one of the team members involved in making our project known to social media. You could say she is our community manager. |
Advisors
We also have two advisors, Carlos Toscano and Salva Duran, who have kindly supervised and helped us all along the project and to whom we are sincerely grateful.
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Joan is the oldest from our group, which is why he appears as an advisor, however he has been one of us since the first moment. He already obtained a degree in psychology, but no, he has not psychoanalyzed us all (yet)! He has managed to create all the mathematical models and simulations using Python, he has saved us all from the hard job of building a model by using kinematics. He is very into modeling and has a very good vision for informatics and mathematics (smart guy), which is one of the many reasons he will finish his degree at Cambridge University working with the brain, the thing he likes the most to model. |
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Multicellularity has been invented more than twenty-five times independently over the course of the evolution of our biosphere despite being plagued with numerous challenges: cheaters, cancer and the efficient construction of form. Using wet-lab and dry-lab approximations, Salva tries to reconstruct general features of multicellular systems: from the rules necessary to build structures and patterns in the developing embryo to the selective pressures that can drive this major transition in evolution. He is also a founding member and VP of Moirai Biodesign, a company developing new technologies for leukemia diagnostics and therapeutics using RNA synthetic biology tools. |
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Born in Sevilla in 1985, he started his studies at Universidad de Sevilla in Mathematics and then switched to Biology. Meanwhile he joined Dr. Enrique Cerdá-Olmedo's lab focused in Phycomices genetics and participated in iGEM 2011. After that, he did his master in biomedical research at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, where he is doing now his PhD in systems biology with Dr. Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo. Now he is investigating E. coli stationary phase and advising UPF's iGEM team. He still likes maths and enjoys playing piano. |
