Team:UC San Diego/Team

Varun is a second year student at UCSD majoring in Bioengineering (Biotechnology) and Management Science. His research interests lie in the field of nanotechnology and cancer therapeutics. In his free time, he enjoys playing ping pong or reading a good book. As project leader, he is involved in a little bit of everything and primarily in charge of overall team vision, including human practices and wiki design and construction.

Yuya Zhao

Yuya is a third year biochemistry and cell biology major, but is graduating at the end of this year. She is a lab rat, and her spirit animal is a crow because crows are smart. She is head of the wetlab team for this year’s team.

Yansen Geng

Yunshu (Yansen) Geng is a third year student at UCSD majoring in Bioengineering (Biotechnology) and minoring in Mathematics. His research interests lie in the field of microfluidics, metabolic engineering, and computational biology. In his free time, he enjoys cooking and playing tennis. An interesting fact about him is that he really likes tacos. Yansen is primarily in charge of the computational modeling and help with the wet-lab. He also helps with the web construction and presentation.

Emma Hu

Emma is a third-year student at UCSD majoring in Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Her research interests lie in Signaling pathways in heart diseases and GPCRs in growth regulation. In her free time, she enjoys dancing and hiking. Jieting is primarily in charge of research with interlab study.

Victoria Rodriguez

Victoria Rodriguez is going into her second year here at UCSD as a Neuroscience and Physiology major. She is interested in doing research on developing schizophrenia medications. Her hobbies are watching Netflix and eating. An interesting fact about her is that she is vegetarian. Victoria's role in iGEM is to help acquire funding, aid in wet-lab work, and run our social media accounts.

Roger Tseng and the Golden Lab

We would also like to extend an additional thank-you to the Golden Lab, whose support for crucial along every step of the way. Dr. Jim Golden helped ensure that this year's team was supported by multiple departments and school faculty, and also offered us a lab space for our work during the summer. We truly enjoyed being a part of his group, and cannot wait to see his research impact our daily lives in the future. In addition, Dr. Roger Tseng was also key to our overall success; he helped us with early protocol design and trained all of the lab group members. He also sat in on our daily meetings and he helped identify key aspects to troubleshoot within our project. He also helped arrange financial support from the Golden Lab, and helped ensure that everything ran smoothly. His veteran leadership experience was invaluable for a small team like ours, and we cannot express enough gratitude for Dr. Golden and Dr. Tseng.

Other Collaborators

We would also like to give a shoutout to Yubin Cho who helped us with the artistic aspects of our project, including the assembly of our textbook and design of the cover pages