Desiree Scamander -

The only actual wizard in our team

When Desiree arrived at the city of Hamburg to complement her magical studies with a Master of Molecular Life Sciences, far away from home with her magical bag of lab equipment, she did not know what adventure laid upon her. At night (mostly on Fridays) she hunts Nifflers and Bowtruckles with her wizard-orchestra-group. But at day she supports our muggle-team and due to her time-turner she has always the time to be at the lab, when everyone else is busy. Furthermore, her good attention at potion class helps us to understand biological background and not getting lost in things that have to be organised. Most of the time she runs the daily work of our lab with the aid of her house elves Annika and Franzi (our other master students). The only reason we know about her secret identity is her language, which indicates education far away from a muggle society, which she claims to be a dialect from southern Germany. But we see the Ravenclaw inside her, intelligent and creative, and therefore we like her and her wicked smile!

The Nurse (beeologist)

His beard is probably iGEMs most epic beard. For this reason, he found a place among us. He believes that secretly he is related to Jon Snow hence he always claims to know nothing. Knowing nothing however leads to a lot of questions and he is not afraid to ask them. Which greatly benefits the Team by clarifying everything in complete Detail. So Kutte became a true biocatalyst who is able to promote our interdisciplinary work.

The newbie turning expert Geoffrey has never been in a laboratory before this year’s competition, nor had he heard a great deal about biochemistry or synthetic biology, but he is a quick learner, meaning that he soon became of valuable support, especially for boosting the atmosphere in the lab.

Apart from his work in the lab he is highly involved in the Human Practices team, where he has been leading his own little side project which has focused on interdisciplinary work. We presented our “learning by teaching” concept to other students of education and the event was organized by Geoffrey. He has also helped with sponsoring.

Chemistry department -

responsible for holding up the common sense in the chem lab.

With Carla, we have a trueblood noble in our ranks. That said Carla had the funniest reply to her lacking attendance for one of our weekly seminars, stating that she had to supervise the gardeners which took longer than expected on that day. Noblesse obliges.

On a more serious note Carla was one of the driving forces in the design of our chemistry departments experiments doing a lot of research and burying us under a mountain of synthesis papers, which was necessary to derive the reactions to synthesize the three siderophores from scratch for testing purposes.

Additionally, Carla enabled a lot of our early lab work in the biochemistry department by accompanying the few Life Science people which had time to come to the lab, so our promise to work in groups of two in the lab could be fulfilled.