Our Story

Comprised of around 20 students in the Edmonton area, UrbanTundra Edmonton is the first high school iGEM team in the Edmonton area. We first discovered iGEM at the yearly Science Expo youth conference where a member of FREDsense, the 2012 University of Calgary iGEM team, gave a keynote speech on iGEM and synthetic biology. When we first started our team we had no mentors, no guidance, and no support. Our schools refused to fund the initial $6000 registration fee, so we took it upon ourselves and paid the fee out of our own pockets. We registered the team two minutes prior to the deadline, and went the first month without a Principal Investigator. By chance, we stumbled upon Mike Ellison, a professor at the University of Alberta Department of Biochemistry, who had worked with previous iGEM teams at the collegiate level. It took some pestering but Dr. Ellison (or Mike as he calls himself) agreed to be our mentor, and helped us obtain the research advisors, materials, training, and lab space necessary to complete our project.