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!

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.

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.

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.

Nico is a 23 year old German and Slovene. Since 2013 he studies nanoscience as a graduate student. As part of the nano division his job in the iGEM-Team is to produce a lung-on-a-chip to simulate the in vivo functions of lung cells regarding toxicology of our siderophores, while also substituting animals as laboratory test subjects. He joined iGEM because of the great opportunity to work in such an interdisciplinary team. As the best styled wizard in the lab, he is not only able to perfectly well dress like a muggle, but also matches his lab coat with his wand.

Valerie has been in the team since the beginning of the project and established herself as sponsoring queen involved in organising everything. She is probably the only morning person in the team and spent every free minute in the labs where she proved herself irreplaceable. She took care of keeping everything in order and made sure we did not descend into chaos, mainly overseeing the lab books and pushing everybody in keep themselves updated (hence her deep-seated contempt for loose paper). Besides she worked on our wiki and helped to organise Human Practice activities. Since her real interest lies in finding out how to replicate Gilderoy Lockhard’s flawless boneless arm in Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets, she has left the University of Hamburg after two years studying Molecular Life Sciences to got to Med School in Freiburg starting this fall.

Ruth (25) interrupted her study of Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Hamburg after her bachelor’s degree in order to spend more time with her second passion: working with children. But after a year abroad as an au pair she missed the lab and Hamburg too much and came back to get her Master’s degree. In addition to working in the lab, she keeps an eye on the finances of the iGEM team, which she is so good at she could work for Gringotts. As she has a sweet tooth, she usually is able to offer some chocolate to her lab partners. Having pet rats at home, she can’t picture herself experimenting with these typical lab animals and hopes for a scientific career without animal testing.

Tim helped to develop the Nano-part of our project and established the contact to Professor Trebbin who supervised the nano project. Tim spent so much time abroad we were always wondering if he is simultaneously studying at another wizard school.

Guillermo studies Molecular Life Sciences kind of stumbled by accident into the iGEM project, but has quickly proven himself to be one of the most devoted team members. For him it is always exciting to work in a team and to discover something new together and to gain new experiences. In this project, he has not only brought his team skills to nearly perfection, but has also extended his horizon in the area of ​​synthetic biology. Here we must acknowledge that we probably would have starved without Guillermo, the king of BBQ and with his magical ability of organizing food at late lab hours. Out of all the experiences he got from iGEM he liked most to be part of the team and get connected to other exciting scientists from cooperating teams. In our group he is the Neville Longbottom, first smiled on, but later turns out to be one of the most valuable lab workers. Who knows maybe one day he'll lead his own iGEM team or ends up being a professor just like Neville.

Annika is also our lab-house elf and she brings sunshine into the room as soon as she steps in. It´s hard to tell if that comes from her sunny personality or if her mystical elf magic has something to do with it.

Together with Franzi she accompanies Desirée in the Master Studies of Molecular Life Sciences. When she works in the lab it is stunning to watch how the work gets done quickly and perfectly accurate. Privately she does not only fight resistant germs but sometimes also their hosts.

Jan is graduate student of Chemistry and supported the chemistry division by developing a synthesis method for Nor-Pyochelin. He had great fun working with Martin in the Lab, not only due to the fact that they often had a completely different perspective on how everything should work. In completing the Nor-Pyochelin he delivered the most important substance to our further research, the key ingredient to our philosopher´s stone.

Our only true Muggle who has no clue of the wizard world he is working in. He started studying chemistry back in the day because he was actually interested in the stuff you learn at school. The turning point, however, was in the third semester. While extracting with toluene, he thought to himself: "Why not use toluene-d8 instead? Higher density means more weight and more gains!" From that moment on, his life goal was to become the most bulked-up scientist to stand in a lab. Fascinated by this idea, he started swapping normal solvents for deuterated first. Then, he began incorporating denser solvents (and, of course, the deuterated versions) into his reaction work-ups. Afterwards, he bought four 5 L round bottom flasks, connected them with glass pipes, filled them up with 13C37Cl4 and got his first set of dumbbells! This is, however, only his first step towards building great body mass. Future investments will include even denser solvents (CD2Br2), larger flasks and flasks made from lead crystal.

Everything is possible, you just gotta believe.

As a undergrad student of nanoscience, he did not have a lot of experience in synthetic biology when this project started, but has always been interested in any kind of medical applications. Let it be lab- or cells-on-a-chip applications or the development of a new therapeutics. This made the iGEM competition so interesting to him: he learned something in an area that he is not able to in his normal studies. He always enjoys to get into new fields. Furthermore, Sponsoring and Human Practices really got him into it. He is somebody who loves to travel and to be with people from different countries and culture, therefore the possibility of collaborations with teams from other countries fascinates him.

Kamil had a significant contribution in initialy steering the topic of our project by bringing up the idea of using gallium siderophores as an antibacterial strategy.

He graduated from two universities in the fields of Biotechnology (engineer´s degree) and Microbiology (bachelor´s degree). Furthermore, he has diploma from the Sport Academy as a coach in athletics. Currently he is studying Molecular Life Sciences (master´s degree) in Hamburg. He has a long-standing interest in the usage of gallium and iron acquisition in development of antibacterial therapies and published in this matter diverse outreach papers.

Svenja studies Molecular Life Sciences. Her special talent is making cookies and cake magically disappear during meetings. She put some effort in sponsoring using old-fashioned muggle devices like telephones and helped in the lab until she left to South Africa to do an internship with another wizard school.

Jannes is 21 years old and a Graphic Design student.

He studies at the HTK - Hamburger Technische Kunstschule in Hamburg and loves to create good design. Together with Leona, Julian and Tom from the "Vantlers Project" he developed the wiki and corporate design of iGEM Hamburg 2017.