Team members
As a tight-knit team with just 8 members, we have individually undertaken roles in numerous areas. Here, we would like to highlight the areas of the project in which we have each had the greatest impact.
Dan Harper
Dan’s natural abilities within scientific communication were invaluable to the creation of various informative educational tools. He created a fun and light-hearted introduction to synthetic biology with both his ‘Test-Tube’ podcast series and plasmid board game. His ambitious outlook and creative vision also helped to deliver an eye-catching promotional video.
Erik Fledderus
Erik's talents within graphic design have been an asset to creating a bold and recognisable branding for our team. His illustrations have been invaluable to wiki iconography, social media posts, and our educational game. Erik has also shown great persistence and problem solving in web design to transform our visions into a reality.
Ellie Adams
Ellie took a leading role in outreach, coordinating thorough stakeholder research and engagement to inform project progression as well as liaising with other teams in order to form meaningful collaborations. She undertook regular lab work including the preliminaries utilising trial and error to update protocols to optimise our main experiments. Ellie’s strong critical thinking skills encouraged meaningful reflection on the project’s direction and her proactive nature led to holistic advancements in its progress.
Grace Poulton
Grace took the lead in our drive for the inclusivity award with the ultimate aim of increasing the accessibility to people with disabilities in STEM. As well as planning the design and prototyping of our accessible pipette, she coordinated an investigative study into its efficacy, as well as creating resources that encourage the dismantling of accessibility barriers in lab spaces. Her knowledge of coding has also been invaluable to the formatting of the wiki pages.
Lucy Backhouse
Lucy informed our experimental design with thorough and meticulous background research. She has been deeply involved with industry engagement, professionally directing various meetings with sponsors and stakeholders. The industry expertise acquired has helped to hone and direct our project into having exciting market potential for the future. Additionally, she spent frequent time in the lab throughout the summer, advancing both the biological and graphene sides of our project.
Matt Ludwig
With exceptional expertise in mathematics and patience, Matt has led experimental design as well as undertaken all our modelling. Matt’s models helped us to inform plasmid design, therefore optimising our experimental understanding as well as anticipating and preventing experimental design flaws. His broad background research and pioneering ideas in the lab have led to some breakthroughs in the efficiencies of our experimental designs.
Oliver Cook
Oliver has been at the forefront of idea generation, as well as the design and direction of our project. He has efficiently developed and carried out both wet and dry lab experiments throughout the project. Oliver’s natural leadership abilities and effective delegation have led to smooth and efficient working in the lab. His proficient communication skills have led to long-term and meaningful industry partnerships and his confidence in our potential inspired us to set high aspirations for our final product.
Priena Pan
Priena has taken a leading role in the creation of our accessible lab equipment and she engineered a bionic robot hand with unique 3D modelling expertise. She took an active role in the wet lab and her drive to achieve great results have led to meaningful improvements to major experiments. She has been deeply involved in designing and structuring workshops for education and worked closely with universities, colleges and schools to present our projects.
Supervisors
Dr Chloe Singleton has been an invaluable supervisor throughout this entire process, from ensuring we had time to bond as a team in boot camp week to organising every minute detail to get us to the jamboree. Throughout, she has enabled freedom and creativity in our idea generation and project direction whilst gently guiding from a distance and we are so appreciative of her ever-present support. Her experience with optimising our sequences was invaluable. We thank her for being patient when we make mistakes, giving encouragement when things are going well, and always being on hand for support and guidance.
We are also extremely grateful to Dr Mark Hewlett for always making time for us to run ideas past him and supporting us in the lab. As a team, we have certainly grown from our bootcamp week with bacterial transformations. We attribute this to Mark for constantly being on hand to answer endless streams of questions. Mark’s valuable feedback and encouragement have been instrumental in maintaining our drive and progress.
Professor John Love has aided us with our application of the iGEM grant. His extensive industry experience was incredibly useful in guiding the beginning stages of brainstorming and formulating our project and he has provided us with a sense of how much we can realistically hope to achieve over the summer.
Academic support
Andy Wild delivered a series of introductory talks in bootcamp week, which included some incredibly valuable insights and cautionary tales from his iGEM experience.
Dr Anna Neves for providing us with materials, resources, and lab equipment to assist with our utilisation of graphene.
Kavya Sreeja Sadanandan for helping us to use various machines and supervising the undertaking of our preliminary experiments in the graphene lab.
Professor Ozgur Akman for his contribution to the development of our model systems via in depth discussions surrounding their validity.
Technical support
As manager of our lab, Matilda Dixon gave a thorough lab induction and training which helped us to feel comfortable and safe in our research environment.
Thank you to Sophie Groenhof and Gabrielle Joslin for not only their tolerance, but also for their kindness towards us overtaking their lab space. Their advice and supervision have been incredibly helpful.
We would like to especially thank Dan Barber for his unconditional support, provision of protocols and kind words of encouragement when things go wrong.
Georgina Moore facilitated a smooth and efficient production of our promotional video by the provision of camera equipment as well as filming and editing expertise.
Jordanna Broom from the Fab Lab team f assisted us with using their 3D printer which was a key component of our accessible pipette design and printing of our 3D hand model.
As technical manager of the drama department Jon Primose provided us with microphone equipment for our promotional video as well as the expertise for editing our recordings.
Christian Hacker from the Exeter Bioimaging Centre showed us how to operate the SEM and create some fantastic photos of our composite.
Ellen Green from Exeter's Biophysics Department who enabled us to use Raman spectroscopy techniques for further structural analysis of our composite.
Stakeholders
Mireia Garcia from Graphenea advised us on all things graphene in the context of industry, which helped us to appropriately plan our protocols to ensure the most effective methods of measurement.
Ian Archer from IBiolC was extremely generous with his time and resources, providing a masterclass in bioprocess upscaling which helped us to consider the costing of the industrialisation of our process.
A meeting with Pierre Cherrelle, the CEO of Axiles Bionics, helped us to consider our end goal, as well as realistic milestones to aim for within our time scale and we thank him for his time.
Silvia Perrone from Movmedix for giving us the confidence we need to consider the possibility of pushing for a startup by enthusiastically listening to and giving feedback on our pitch.
Adam Davies from Ocean Physio advised us greatly in the practical relevance of potential connective tissue applications of our composite in the context of common injuries and current treatment regimes.
We are extremely grateful for all who volunteered to take part in our inclusivity project, in both the interview series and in-lab study.
Sponsors and supporters
Twist Bioscience and Integrated DNA Technologies for providing us with free DNA for our plasmid design.
Snapgene for providing us with free access to their software.
We thank the University of Exeter for providing us with funding to undertake this project as well as providing of lab and study spaces in both the Bioeconomy centre and Peter Chalk hub.
We are also grateful to the iGEM foundation for providing further financial assistance with the Team Impact Grant.
Thank you to Claire Baker from Gilson who sponsored us with new micropipettes so that we could succeed with our project.