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Attributions

Our team​

Florian Hänsel​

Email, fundraising, human practices, lab work, organization, sponsoring, texting, wiki texts

Meet our first team leader - Florian. He always knows what's going on and pushes our team forward! As our team-leader, we entrust him to keep an overview of the email- and phone-traffic, deadlines, contracts and lab-organization. His fascination for the vast unknown explains his interest for astronomy and marine biology, and his enthusiasm pushed our project to what it is today.

Yasemin Baran aka. Yassy​

Hardware, lab work, newsletter, wiki texts

Next is our second team leader, Yassy. Not only is she ambitious when it comes to sports, but also in the lab. Engineering and hardware are her fieldwork interests! She is one of the members who built our 3D Printer and modified it into a bioprinter - great job! Furthermore, she is always available for team communication and supports the members in every situation. Lastly, our monthly newsletter was possible thanks to her hard work.

Alexa Grebel​

Education, lab work, modelling, wiki texts

Before Alexa studied biology, she had completed an apprenticeship as a biotechnical assistant. Therefore, she could provide a helping hand in the lab work and share her knowledge with the less experienced members! Because she also writes her bachelor thesis in synthetic biology, participating in iGEM offered excellent preparation. Alexa took the lead of the modeling team and showed exemplary engagement!

Max Denter​

Cloning, lab work, wiki texts

Welcome Max, our in-silico pro! Max took charge of designing our primers and constructs and guided other members in transitioning them into actual lab work. His curiosity and ambition allowed him to pick up many new skills for the sake of the team. That's why he is involved in many parts of our iGEM work. Apparently he enjoys being in synthetic biology, because he will start his bachelor thesis in this field soon!

Merve Seker​

Design, human practices, lab work, social media, wiki texts

Merve is our team’s creative backbone! She created the designs for our official logo and our team-shirts. Naturally, her talents also found good use in our social media team!. Merve also engaged in a lot of lab work and represented us at many meetings with other iGEM-teams as well as at Calgary's JulyJam!

Laura Köhler​

Design, education, lab work, social media, wiki texts

Laura is another addition to our team’s creative force! Together with Merve and Jona she runs our social media accounts and she lets her creativity flow freely! With her we also got great reinforcement in the lab or at educational presentations at schools. But science is not her only passion, Laura is really into everything connected to the spiritual world. Be aware that she may start a huge manifestation-ritual to be successful with her upcoming experiments.

Jona Gerhards​

500 g Design, 1 ½ Tsp poster, 1 L stock of texting and a hint of social media

Meet our chef de cuisine! Jona has a background as a chef, now he is handling our science communication, since he also has an academic background in this field. He is our primary presenter, writes a lot of our articles and shows presence on our social media. We also attended several MeetUps with him and presented the Poster, which he designed!

Timo Rhiem​

Education, email, fundraising, human practices, lab work, sponsoring, wiki texts

Timo is involved in our email and sponsoring. He is very committed and contributes wherever he can, if you need help, you can count him in, doesn't matter whether it's in the lab or for some presentations or research.

Oliver Kraft aka. Olli​

Education, Lab work, newsletter, texting, wiki texts

You might recognize Olli from voicing our promotion video. He represented us at many iGEM MeetUps, sometimes as an astronaut and sometimes in plain clothes. His main contribution was in education: Workshops in schools or at the university together with the European Space University for Earth and Humanity (UNIVERSEH) were accomplished with his help. He also contributed in the lab or with writing texts, be it for press articles or for our own newsletter.

Robin Teus​

Lab work, modelling, wiki texts

Robin is not just talented on the saxophone, he is also gifted when it comes to engineering! He helped with the hardware of the 3D Printer and rebuilt it into our bioprinter. He also ran point in measuring data required for our modeling.

Melissa Schmauder​

Education, Lab work, modelling, wiki texts

One of Melissa's most favourite topics is botanics and cultivating plants, so maybe she will be our first gardener on Mars. She was very active in the wet lab, and assisted with the measurements required for our metabolic model. She also contributed to school presentations for our educational outreach, holding presentations in front of many classes.

Sarah Jasmin Zemani​

Hardware, lab work

Jasmin is also part of our hardware team, so she was involved in setting up our printer. Additionally, she helped with the other lab work. Although Jasmin had voted out chemistry and physics at school directly at the time, her focus is now clearly on the sciences. Through iGEM, she was able to gain a lot of experience in the laboratory and also developed hardware interests.

Can Karka​

IT, modelling, wiki design

We are not just biologists. Can joined our team as a computer scientist. This wiki would not have been possible without his contribution! His computational knowledge was also very valuable for our modeling work! Furthermore, he participated in the 3D printing workshop, by our PI because of his enthusiasm for 3D-modelling and -printing.

Vallery Heidelberg​

Human practices, lab work, wiki texts

Vallery joined our team halfway through the year. Her perspective as a chemistry student was a valuable addition to our team and project! She also involved herself in human practices and participated in calls with experts!

Advisors​

Carroll Diehl​

As Carroll is working with 3D printers and our organism of choice Azotobacter vinelandii as well, we always had a great contact person in our team for any kind of questions we had. Luckily, his workspace is in the same Lab as ours, so he was never far away for supporting us!

Lucas Müller​

Lucas was a member of last year's iGEM-team in Düsseldorf - that's why he could support us with his direct experience, especially with the tasks he took care of in the previous project like e-mail and outreach, sponsoring and social media.

Moritz Göbel​

Moritz was part of previous iGEM-team Düsseldorf as well. As a former team leader, he was always a good support in our Lab Work. Although he spent a few months this year in France for his studies, he was always a remote contact person for our team.

Vincent Holletzek​

Since Vincent already has a few years of iGEM experience, he could always prepare us for possible obstacles we would face throughout the year. Not just for memes, but also in organizational aspects, Vincent was indispensable for us. Of course, he also had a helping hand in lab work or whenever we had any content questions.

Eva Helena Aden​

Helena is the third former member who decided to advise the next iGEM-team. We are glad we got her assistance in situations, in which she had more experience than ourselves.

Shrihari Negi​

Shrihari also has some iGEM experience, he participated in 2019 with team SNU India from Shiv Nadar University. Currently, he is a master student in biology associated with the CEPLAS graduate school. Because of this experience, he was a great support and always willing to help!

Ferhat Tohidi Far​

Ferhat was also a former member of iGEM Düsseldorf and was responsible for everything related to Computer Science. He was indispensable for our wiki design this year. Thanks for your contributions!

External sources​

Institute for Cell and Interaction Biology (ICIB) by Prof. Dr. Guido Grossmann​

This year we have two lab spaces to work, one of them is in the ICIB run by our first principal investigator Prof. Dr. Guido Grossmann. Thanks for welcoming us in your lab as well as helping us with any kind of questions! Prof. Grossmann arranged and participated in our meeting with Dr. Markus Braun from the German space agency (DLR), and thus supported us with human practices as well! Another special thanks goes to Michaela Gerads, the laboratory manager from the ICIB. The team around her was always ready to help and gave us a warm welcome in their workspace! Especially Dr. Mayuri Sadoine helped us with the measurements necessary for our model. Also, PhD Student Christian-Frederic Kaiser was always willing to help us, just like everyone else, who was sharing their workspace with us! PhD student Daša Wernerová assisted us with the hardware work and provided us necessary parts for the modification of our 3D printer.

Prof. Dr. Matias Zurbriggen​

Our second workspace, was provided by Prof. Dr. Matias Zurbriggen’s Institute of Synthetic Biology. The additional workspace offered additional possibilities for lab work. Prof. Zurbriggen also was always available for answering questions. Our PIs participated in our meetings regularly and were always open to give suggestions and feedback. Since his own research includes optogenetic systems, he was our primary contact regarding this topic. He was also very helpful with PCR troubleshooting and gave us useful tips!

Luca Engl​

Videographer and certified drone pilot Luca Engl recorded and edited our promotion video. We could not have done it without him! To learn more about him or to use his services, make sure to check him out: https://lucaengl.myportfolio.com/

Dr. St. Elmo Wilken​

Dr. Wilken from the Institute for Quantitative and Theoretical Biology offered us support for creating our metabolic model for Azotobacter vinelandii. He provided and recommended certain protocols and publications for the measurements.

Dr. Markus Braun​

We are grateful we met Dr. Braun, the Head of Space Life Sciences Programme at the german space agency (DLR). Thank you for meeting with us and giving us feedback and advice on our project.

Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences​

The CEPLAS cluster of excellence, an international leading research cluster for plant sciences at the universities of Düsseldorf, Cologne, the Max-Planck-Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the Research Center Jülich, has been sponsoring all our team‘s scientific research and competition‘s fees for a few years now. We thank CEPLAS not only for the generous sponsoring, but also for all the assistance regarding bills and accounting throughout the year!

UNIVERSEH​

Luckily, a former member of our team worked with UNIVERSEH, the European Space University for Earth and Humanity, which got us the opportunity to organize a workshop and a Pecha Kucha talk about project finding and innovation at the event “Campus der Ideen” at our University. You can read more about how UNIVERSEH assisted us in reaching our Education goals here (add link to Education page).

BioSpektrum​

The magazine for Bioscience gave us and many other iGEM-teams the possibility to present our project in an article in their latest September edition. We are glad we had the chance to reach out to interested people through an established magazine like BioSpektrum. Thanks for this great Opportunity!

Dr. Arne Claussen​

Thanks to Dr. Arne Claussen for the opportunity to release a press article about our project.