Team:INSA-UPS France/Team

Students

9 crocodiles fans working in the lab, with the help of 11 supervisors. We come from from 3 different schools: Université Paul Sabatier, INSA Lyon and INSA Toulouse.

Margaux Cescato

Studies biotechnology at Université Paul Sabatier

Collaboration master

With her incredible amount of knowledge in biology, Margaux is the one who first lead us through the crocodile’s world. She is the ears and voice of the team, always cheerful when a skype is planned with another team… and very calm in front of communication technology mysteries (“Can you hear us??”). Last but not least, Margaux is definitely the queen of the cell schemes on the wiki!

Leïla Dumas

Studies biological engineering at INSA Toulouse

Device engineer

Leïla studies biological engineering at INSA Toulouse. Think about her as a real biology lover, singing lullaby to her transformants and amazed by organisms as weird as Crepidula fornicata. Straightforward, she will always tell you what’s in her mind, but without changing her usual calm voice. One last thing: don’t even think disturbing her during her daily nap after lunch ;)

Léo Gerlin

Studies biological engineering at INSA Toulouse

Pillar of modeling

He is mainly composed of love, and is still trying to find the best way of bringing good luck to his colonies. Léo hasn’t slept since the 25th of January, official date of the team creation. While he feeds us with tofu, we are all getting a hard time to feed him data for his modelisation.

Marie Grandjean

Studies molecular microbiology at Université Paul Sabatier

Human Practicer

Able to stay amazed 5 minutes in front of fungi growing on a petri dish, Marie is especially in love with Deinococcus radiodurans. Besides, she is a true hard-worker, she already stayed in the lab until the night (midnight?) to transform her cells. She is our public engagement enthusiast, always coming up with original ideas to show that microbiology is a fun field!

Téo Hebra

Studies biotechnology at Université Paul Sabatier

Lab Director

Téo is our lab director, meaning that he supervises the experiments! Need any advice? Come talk to him, he will help you with his great lab experience. Always singing, smiling and believing in our cloning strategies, he is the optimistic strength we needed in our team… except the tragic day when he spill all his miniprep tubes.

Margaux Poulalier-Delavelle

Studies biochemistry & biotechnologies at INSA Lyon

Press Manager

In the lab, Margaux never goes anywhere without her notebook, writing everything in it. Her personal globetrotting experience was a great help to organize our trip to Boston: Airbnb and Air France have no secrets for her! She is also our reference for the ravishing tongue of Shakespeare, she will be fluent in no time.

Anna Thibert

Studies bioinformatics & systems biology at Université Paul Sabatier

Wiki geek

Anna builds the wiki with a lot of hard work, strong efficiency and a great sense of design, fueling herself with her secret coffee recipe. Even if she is an informatician, she fell in love with minipreps, analytical digestions and agarose gels, and became a great molecular biologist! She even integrated the biologist’s humor, and always finds a way to refer to an enzyme or a plasmid. Now, she can switch from one field to the other as easily as on her rollerskates.

Maxant Viver

Studies biological engineering at INSA Toulouse

Treasure keeper

He works hard with treasury and sponsoring to fund our project, and suffer chronic heart failures whenever he hears: “we need to buy another enzyme”. He is also our hero: with him, our lab stays a clean and tidy place! He comes to master our vintage autoclave pretty well. We’re still trying to locate his home, somehow lost in the countryside...

Paul Zanoni

Studies biochemistry & biotechnologies at INSA Lyon

Registry builder

Paul is responsible of Integrated Human Practices and Registry. Usually located in the ethidium bromide room, being in contact with this dangerous molecule gave him supernatural powers: he has successful cloning with strange methods, and has a special talent for ethical considerations. Ethidium bromide also transformed him into a fun facts machine, but these facts will be kept confidential...

Advisors & Instructors

Brice Enjalbert

Brice Enjalbert is the veteran of our instructors and was present to all the Giant Jamboree in Boston so far. Pessimistic down to his bones, he loves nothing more than to pressure iGEM students.
(Muwahahaha...)

Régis Fauré

Régis has skills in organic synthesis, he supplies vital in-house expertise in the field of glycochemistry, such as design of ad hoc substrates for easy specific detection of enzymatic activities Recently, he began to shift in his research focus towards the redesign of enzyme active sites, based on the use of unnatural amino acids. Whatever happen on earth or even in the universe, Regis wears pants from the 21st of december, and wears shorts from the 31st of march.

Stéphanie Heux

Stéphanie is our primary PI with Brice Enjalbert. She is interested in the microbial metabolism and try to understand and predict the behaviour of natural and synthetic microorganisms for biotechnological applications. To do that, she developeds in silico (reconstruction and modelling of the metabolism) and experimental (metabolomics, fluxomics) methods. Stéphanie is less and less prone to be late by racing from meetings to meetings with her novel super-scooter.

Anthony Henras

Anthony had a training in microbiology and molecular biology and is currently a permanent researcher at the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). His research interests focus on the study of ribosome biogenesis in eukaryotes, using mainly yeast and human cell as model organisms.

Anthony has fantastic handy-man skills and loves to fix broken devices. As a result, over the years, the lab has become a true museum of scientific antiquities.
Winks ;)

Yves Romeo

Yves is a lecturer in Genetics at Université Paul Sabatier. His main interest is to understand how intracellular signalling pathways regulate cell growth and proliferation.

Yves is the « Purple man » of the 2017 iGEM team. He loves purple. His dresses in purple, his Power Point presentations are in purple and he wears purple gloves in the lab. However he can still do better since his car is green and he does not like eggplants! Yves Romeo is also a kebab chicken sandwich aficionado. He had this sandwich everytime during our lunch time iGEM metings along with a « pain au raisin ».

Pierre Millard

Pierre combines experimental and computational approaches to investigate the operation of microbial metabolic networks in the context of systems and synthetic biology projects. In iGEM, Pierre contributes to scientific discussions and assists more specifically in the modeling part of the project.
His precious help in model and experiments during the project could be sponsored by his local bakery, because he ate one "religieuse au chocolat" (a french pastry) during each iGEM meeting, which led to more than thirty pastries for Croc'n Cholera!

Florence Bordes

Florence is our yeast specialist. Even if she works with a strange yeast (Yarrowia lipolytica), she helped us with the more classical Pichia pastoris yeast. She was our official furnisher of Yeast Nitogen Base and also other compounds for molecular biology.
Florence was the first to gain from the students the name of "tata flo" (means aunty flo) this kind of surname gained a great popularity during the 3 month of experiments. Thanks you Tata Flo <3

Cédric Montanier

Cedric's main topic is about relationship between synergism and modularity in enzymes involved in deconstruction of polysaccharides from plant cell wall. In particular, he is interested to better understand how spatial proximity and modularity within enzymes impact hydrolysis of such complex polysaccharides. Cedric’s presence on iGEM meeting is correlated with an extension about 30% of the time of discussion.

Marie-Pierre Escudié

PhD in Political Science ("Gaston Berger, les sciences humaines et les sciences de l'ingénieur, un projet de réforme de la société", Université Lumière Lyon 2, December 2013). I'm presently a Research engineer at Institut Gaston Berger (INSA Lyon), I study how politics, culture, and ethics of engineer shape science and technology. My teaching interests are interdisciplinary in the field of science and technology studies.

Yoann Louis

PhD in environmental and analytical chemistry and now Associate professor at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, he is working in the MAP laboratory (Microbiology, Adaptation and Pathogenesis lab) in a new team AME (Adaptation to Extreme Environments, created in 2016). Since 2012 he is trying to do his best to help the iGEM-ers of INSA Lyon team to go as far as possible in their project.

SnabI the Poltergeist

I’m SnaBI the cursed crocodile. Since the iGEMers failed lab works, their misfortune and despair summoned me out of my tomb. My reigns of terror has started. During the summer, I have haunted the lab to spread panic and terror. The cry of my depressed iGEMers slaves was a peaceful enjoyment. Mwwwaaaaaha! Fear my judgement! SnaBI is coming!