Students
Jason Hu
Project lead, experimental design, graphic design, video production, wet lab, mammalian cell culturing, fundraising, education outreach, human practices, finances
Madison Hypes
Wet leab lead, experimental design, wet lab, DNA cloning, mammalian cell culturing
Ricardo Valdarrago
Dry lab lead, primary software engineer, wiki builder
Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez
Wet lab, DNA cloning, mammalian cell culturing, dry lab, plasmid assembly notebook
Abigail Humphries
Wet lab, mammalian cell culturing, human practices, research ethics, fundraising
Jiaxun Li
Wet lab, DNA cloning, mammalian cell culturing, supplemental materials
Ethan Wright
Dry lab, disease spread modeling, fundraising
Advisors
Project Cargo would like to thank Dr. Albeck, Dr. Aviran, Dr. Fraser, Dr. Radecki for their fantastic expertise and for their time acting as the advisors for Project Cargo. We would not have made as far as we did without their input on the complex field of RNA chemistry and real time translation regulation. We would also love to thank the wonderful Dustin Boeger and Glenn Ellis for their support and expertise as instructors. Science is a multidisciplinary field and we are so honoured to have had their guidance on how to present data and conduct ethical human research. We are deeply grateful to everyone involved and we look forward to the possibilities of the future!
Dr. Albeck
Dr. Albeck works within the exciting field of real time fluorescent cell-imaging. He has acted as our primary wet lab advisor, teaching us many essential mammalian cell cutting techniques and allowing us to use his fluorescent imaging microscope. His lab background is the bioinformatic processing of data from the large data sets we collected.
Dr. Aviran
Dr. Aviran’s work is with RNA biology and computational genomics. She and her lab work with the structural prediction of RNA molecules and inferring the biochemical functions from large sets of data. She and her lab were an invaluable help for our dry lab development of Foldase and we greatly appreciate her inputs on how to stress test our software pipeline. We appreciate the willingness to meet with us and look forward to expanding Foldase again in the future.
Dr. Fraser
Dr Fraser and his group research the mechanisms of translation of mRNA in human systems. They take a very mechanical approach to the initiation and regulation of ribosome recruitments proteins and other regulatory pieces. Dr. Fraser was able to provide us extremely helpful insight on where to begin planning to insert our IRE structure and on how mRNA translation can be affected by doing so. His input saved us much time on the dry lab analysis by narrowing our iteration window.
Dr. Radecki
Dr. Radecki recently finished his PhD from Dr. Aviran’s lab provided us with essential pieces of code that create the base pairing probabilities that Foldase depends on for determining an RNA structure location. His code also generates the dot-plot structure we used for determining the best location for our RNA constructs. He was a fantastic mentor for our dry lab team and helped Foldase be as robust as it is now.
Glenn Ellis
Mr. Glenn Ellis is a bioethicist and medical writer on the equity of healthcare in the US. He helped us determine a human practice question that was genuinely valuable to research beyond the scope of iGEM. He acted as a gatekeeper to help us find the best candidates for our phone interviews while also being a coaching figure for our human outreach team to help us grow as researchers and communicators. He is as wise as he is jovial and we look forward to communicating with him again for even more research efforts.
Dustin Boegar
Dustin Boeger was our wiki building instructor who helped us in the early stages determine how to even go about building a wiki when our web building background was extremely sparse. He is a web content manager at the UC Davis School and Law and we were lucky to have some of his time a few times a week to be able to get his input on our design and workflow.
Extra Thanks
We would also like to thank Nick Decuzzi for his help with our data graphing and interpretation, Devan Tuck for assisting us with transfection and microscope protocols, and Traci Shiu for fundraising.