Attributions

out of team connections

We would like to thank the following individuals for speaking with us and influencing our project:

Jerome De Buck
Chantall McMillan
Doug Doyle-Baker
Lara Chan
Serge Chalhoub
Jeni Vasquez

We would like to thank Mr. John Whitbread for his contributions to the overall design of our project. Through his input and experiences, we were able to alter GlucoLitter to best fit the needs of cat owners.

We would like to thank Dr. Nicole Howard for answering some of our questions regarding the prevalance of diabetes in shelters so that we could adjust our project to be as beneficial and useful to others as it can be.

We would like to thank Dr. Laura Keffer-Wilkes for providing us with guidance and hosting multiple workshops so that we could gain a fundamental understanding of the main concepts in synthetic biology.

We would like to thank the University of Calgary team for coming to our meetings and answering our project related questions as well as asking us questions so that we could consider other perspectives. We also appreciate their patience in guiding us through the challenges that we have faced.

We would like to thank Mindfuel for giving us the opportunity to participate in workshops, learn more about synthetic biology and compete in the tech futures challenge, which allowed us to gain crucial skills.

We would like to thank the cGEM organizers for providing us with meaningful feedback and giving us the chance to experience a competition setting along with all the workshops we were able to participate in.

We would like to thank Christian Emond for his guidance and supervision throughout the process and for hosting multiple workshops for us.

We would like to thank Dr. Catherine Miller for providing us with guiding information into the reality of how feline diabetes is treated in the real world. Dr. Miller provided us with suggestions, constructive criticism and general feedback on all aspects of our project which we can not thank her enough for. We are also appreciative of Dr. Miller for forwarding our project to multiple other contacts that will enable us to further or work in the areas of research and application to entrepreneurship.

We would like to thank Emily Chorwood for providing us with meaningful information about feline diabetes, its prevalence and ways to improve our feline diabetes testing method so that it aligns with veterinary concerns.

mentors

We would like to thank Dr. Iaci Soares for supporting, teaching and guiding our team to success by giving us advice and guiding us through challenges. We truly would not have been able to come as far as we did without your consistent support.

We would like to thank Mx. Dallas McLaughlin for hosting our weekly team meetings and helping our teams understand their upcoming goals. Furthermore, we are appreciative of Mx. Dallas’ willingness to make themselves available at any time to help out with iGEM.

We would like to thank Ms. Fatima Ghanem for providing advice and support throughout the entire process. We are also greatful to her for introducing iGEM to our school.

We would like to thank Ms. Mia MacTavish for her guidance on the design of the wiki.

team

Aarushi Bhargava (Team Lead): We would like to thank Aarushi for taking up a leadership role on behalf of our entire team, ensuring collaboration, cooperation and enthusiasm is upheld, while also managing the graphic design of our project on videos and our wiki.

Sophia Vig-Benko (Wet Lab lead): We would like to thank Sophia for organizing and completing experiments for the wet lab as well as conducting research that contributed to the design of our project our wiki.

Madison Kritzler (Wet Lab): We would like to thank Madison for all the hard work that she has put into our experimenting process, the research behind it, and her huge contribution to determining our required materials.

Diya Sharma (Wet Lab): We would like to thank Diya for being a hardworking and enthusiastic member of the wet lab team by moving between tasks and providing support through research and feedback as soon as anyone needed it.

Tanisha Mattapalli (Dry Lab): We would like to thank Tanisha for contributing to the written content and design for the website, video scripts, and for gaining several insights through interviewing individuals for our project.

Ayana Abdulla (HP co-lead): We would like to thank Ayana for her immense contribution to the HP portion of our wiki, and for stepping up and working our memebers through ensuring we upheld strong interdisciplinary relationships.

Kaylin Krtizler (HP co-lead): We would like to thank Kaylin for working diligently to solve our fundraising concerns and for completing a large portion of the forms that were necessary to register our team.

teachers, families, and supporters...

We would like to thank all teachers, families and supporters for helping our team project reach new heights. Without them, we would not have been able to succeed to the degree we have. Thank you all for making our project the best it can possibly be.

As a team, we would like to show our appreciation for our school for giving us the amazing opportunity to participate in iGEM. Particularly, we thank Aaron Renert for both funding our project and for supporting us through the entire process.

We would also like to thank previous members of our igem team. Namely, Amelia Goertzen, Lane Begalke, Rozina Khoja, Sera Merali, YJ Dawood, Wasseem Hammad, Dayne Greiner… They set our team up for success and paved the way to glory.

additional information

Though currently our team is not in an official iGEM course, there is one being offered to junior high. In this course, students are to learn the fundamental skills of synthetic biology. Led by Dr. Soares and Ms. Fatima, students are given the chance to both interact with the iGEM team and complete their own experiments to learn about biology.

Our current team was formed in 2020, though our project began in 2019 with different members. We began our brainstorming process in the September of 2020 and began working on GlucoLitter officially in 2020.