Team Freiburg

This year the Freiburg iGEM team consist of 14 students from various fields, such as medicine, biology, chemistry and theology. Together we worked hard to achieve something outstanding this year. We received perpetual support from Dr. Maximilian Ulbrich (BIOSS) and Dr. Nicole Gensch (BIOSS). In addition, we could benefit from the experience of six former iGEM members, our immediate supervisors Julika Neumann, Katharina Ostmann, Philipp Schwenk, Danja Steinberg, Lara Stühn and Nathalie Wössner.

Team Members

Pavel Barahtjan (26)

Mr. Coffee and Beer, the great initiator of barbeques and trends, and our correspondent of collaborations and iGEM - Meetups, he filled the team with his fun and warmth. As the expert for statistics and skillful artist with Adobe Illustrator, he is the creator of the precision-ground figures, you can see everywhere on our wiki. Additionally as our twitter expert, he discovered hash-tags and kept you all informed during the summer. His expertise in cell culture caused us the best collaboration iGEM has ever seen.

Yaël Bengel (19)

The youngest and the freshest mind in our team. His curiosity towards everything and his strive for engaging people into dialogues made him an invaluable power for our Human Practice and Integrated Human Practice.

Dennis Dombrovskij (24)

Dennis is always willing to help, no matter what. He took it upon him to be the leader of our human practice and organized all events and surveys with great care. As possibly the only early bird in our team, he was always one of the first people in the lab doing experiments over and over again until they were optimized to the perfection.

Franziska Elsässer (23)

She designed successfully the knockdown of the endogenous HIF1A, which provided the fundament for our task to construct a logical AND gate. As the sweetheart that she is, she was of great value for our team in many of our scientific challenges. Even during the three months of her internship in Dublin she remained engaged in the project with great interest and excitement.

Philipp Franke (25)

As our chemist, Phil Blackbeard was the one to advise the team on any unwanted reaction in our experiments. Equipped with his ultimate tool, the pH-meter, he was able to detect every proton out of our media. Beyond his chemical expertise he fulfilled an excellent role as a weatherman. He knew exactly, where and when a storm could be awaited, taking care that we always arrived safe home or at the lab. Beside his strange love for gigantic excavators and his unreasonable fear of hummus, he was the one to take your hand and lead you into the furthest niches of dark humour.

Julius Holzschuh (21)

The freshman in our team, who decided to temporarily leave his field of medical studies to dive in all the possibilities synthetic biology is offering. He proved himself to be a great executive experiment conductor and cloning apprentice. He personally took care of our BioBricks and pushed our promoters to function.

Sascha M. Kuhn (24)

Sascha is our head of cell culture and definitely one of the most stylish team members. His nickname is Moses, because he splits cells, like once Moses split the red sea. His resemblance to the Dude from The Big Lebowski (or is it the other way round?) suggests, that he pretty much likes drinking White Russian while lying on the carpet and listening to some Oldies on his record player. But he doesn’t despise any other alcoholic beverage.

Klara L. Lesch (25)

Though we don’t have a designated teamleader, everyone in silence agrees, that Klara is the one who fulfils this role. With an never-ending motivation to grasp on the even most unpleasant tasks, she carried the whole team with her enthusiastic mind and was the one to speak out clear words. She saved our project several times, and she is the one to make the best blots humanity has ever seen.

Philipp Melchinger (24)

Phil Redbeard was the one to inform us about oncoming deadlines. As our safety commissioner, he took care of the lab safety and our safety forms. His laboratory skills out of league, he is able to bring every PCR to perfection. And without his eloquence in scientific formulations, our wiki texts wouldn’t look like that. Philipps helpfulness and patience to explain you even the most obvious things for the fifth time made him a very pleasant labmentor.

Laura Neschen (20)

The pushing force of our AND gate modeling, she is able to set up equations where the simple amateur couldn’t even see any relation. She took care of our modeling collaboration and she is always delighted about new mathematical models.

Jana Neuber (22)

Jana is our universal trump; wherever it burns, she is ready to jump in and help there, where most help is needed. Besides her helpfulness, her experience in FACS analysis and her cell culturing techniques were irreplaceable and allowed us to get every signal out of our cell lines.

Ada Seredynska (22)

Our Head of wiki, and the creative author of our Wiki-design. If you see Ada working on html codes, you know that our wiki will be fixed just in a minute. Without her nobody would have ever seen, what we were able to achieve during our last year.

Niklas Vesper (21)

Nickyboy as the ultimate cloning machine had his own circadian rhythm marked by transformations, PCR’s, Minipreps, Gibson Clonings and the pickup of plasmids by the sequencing guy. Fuelled by maté, coffee, sweets and potato chips, he was the very fundament of our constructs and could lighten up our mood by his random outbursts of high quality memes.

Xueting Wang (24)

Xueting, or Lady Lentivirus, was the pillar for creation of our stable cell lines. Whenever she disappeared into the S2 lab, she came back with wonderful glowing cells. Her ability to work fast, precise and simultaneously on different experiments pushed our project to where we are now.