Stanford-Brown 2016

Michael Becich

Mike is a junior studying Bioengineering, Math, and Computer Science at Stanford University. While he is not encoding life, Mike enjoys running and music. His primary projects were biosensing applications, mechanisms of membrane integration, and melanin UV protection.

Charles Gleason

Charles is a senior studying Applied Math and Biology at Brown University. He enjoys consuming most media and producing a much more limited set of the same. His primary academic interests include the relationship between structure and function, approaching problems from the potentially reductionist perspectives of energy and information limitations, and modeling. This summer, he worked primarily with the membrane projects, focusing on elastin and collagen.

Julia Gross

Julia is a junior studying Biology at Brown University. She is fascinated by the human immune system, and seeks to understand it better one gene at a time. This summer she worked on designing and testing small molecule biosensors, generating a new p-ABA aptamer, and human practices outreach. In her spare time, Julia enjoys reading and traveling.

Cynthia Hale-Phillips

Cynthia is a senior studying Biomedical Engineering at Brown University.

Anna Le

Anna is a senior studying Bioengineering at Stanford University. She is constantly quite amazed by synthetic biology’s ability to engineer life to mimic the function of everyday objects. Over the summer, she primarily worked on the membrane projects. In her spare time, Anna enjoys playing with dogs!

Eric Liu

Eric is a sophomore at Brown University.

Taylor Pullinger

Taylor is a junior at Brown University studying Biology on the Biotechnology/Physiology track. She worked mainly on the chromoproteins subproject, and design for the wiki and presentation this summer. She enjoys painting, reading and traveling.

Elias Robinson

Elias is a junior at Brown University studying Computational Neuroscience with an interest in the design and implementation of neuroprosthetics. Over the summer, Elias was involved with certain aspects of creating the balloon membrane, including producing bacterial latex and installing UV resistance in various materials. Some people say Elias' spirit animal is a golden retriever. Elias says it is himself.

Theresa Sievert

Theresa is a junior studying in Bioengineering at Stanford University. She enjoys crafts, softball, and Bachelorette watch parties.

Taylor Sihavong

Taylor is a junior studying Biology and Product Design Engineering at Stanford University. This summer she enjoyed delving further into synthetic biology and graphic design, and worked largely on the presentation and the melanin/gas production subprojects.

Gordon Sun

Gordon is a recent Stanford graduate in Bioengineering, and is now a first-year Bioengineering PhD student at Rice University. He likes to make knives in his spare time.

Amy Weissenbach

Amy is a senior majoring in English at Stanford University.

Meet our Advisors

Lynn Rothschild

Primary PI

Lynn has helped found astrobiology and synthetic biology at NASA. Her research focuses on how microbes have evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. Field sites range from Australia to Africa to the Andes, off Earth on balloons and in orbit. Rothschild has brought her expertise in extremophiles and evolutionary biology to the field of synthetic biology, demonstrating how synthetic biology can enhance NASA’s missions. Since 2011 she has been privileged to be the faculty advisor of the Stanford-Brown award-winning iGEM team. Rothschild is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and the Explorers Club, and the 2015 winner of the Isaac Asimov Award and Horace Mann Medal. Coming up in 2017: the first iGEM experiment in space! Stay tuned….

Kara Rogers

Secondary PI

Kara is a lecturer in the Bioengineering department at Stanford, and this is her 4th year mentoring an iGEM team. She is a cell biologist by training, having studied mitosis in frogs during her graduate work at UC Berkeley, but has since found her true calling teaching students about synthetic biology hands-on in the lab.

Griffin McCutcheon

Griffin is a bioengineer at Millennium Engineering and Integration Co. working on applications of synthetic biology to space exploration and habitation. His current studies include the PowerCell mission, researching gravity’s effect on synthetic biology, and investigations into biomaterial printing using living cells with the Rothschild Lab at NASA Ames Research Center. Griffin holds a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where he specialized in nanotechnology and tissue engineering.

Trevor! Kalkus

Trevor! graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor's in Bioengineering and a Master's in Electrical Engineering with a bioelectric focus. Having been a member of the Stanford-Brown iGEM team in 2013, he has returned as a mentor while working on a low-cost, disposable tool for sensing specific viral RNA sequences. Originally from Colorado, he also loves skiing, sea turtles, and his dog.

Kosuke Fujishima

Nou moet ek maar van ‘n afstand probeer intimideer. Ek glo hulle hoor en verstaan wat ons sê. “klim uit,” sê ek vir die spinnekop. “Uh-uh,” antwoord hy.

Jesica Navarrete

Jesica is a PhD candidate at the University of California Santa Cruz and her research interests involve the interactions between microorganisms and metals. Jesica’s dissertation research is a NASA-funded project that involves genetically engineering microorganisms to aid in the degradation and separation of the elemental components contained in e-waste.

Ryan Kent

Ryan is becoming a doctor.

Ivan Paulino Lima