Arizona_State
The ASU Team
Amber Mani
Amber Mani is a sophomore majoring in Biomedical Engineering at Arizona State University. After spending a summer at science camp in grade school she fell in love with science and knew that she wanted to grow up to become a scientist someday. During her studies at ASU she has been a finalist in two biomedical design competitions and works hard to continue to thrive in the engineering environment. In life, she hopes to be a part of a team that can someday help design life saving technologies for people in need. In her spare time, Amber enjoys playing the drums, hiking with her dogs and husband, and compound target archery.
Brianna Lopez
Brianna Lopez is a second year Biomedical Engineering student. She has been interested in the realm of genetics and synthetic biology for several years, and is excited to be gaining experience with ASU iGEM. She aspires to engineer tools that will help battle diseases, and create artificial organs. When not in the lab performing serial dilutions, she is reading and enjoying a good campaign of D&D.
Chris Connot
Chris Connot is a Post-Bacc Student earning his second degree in Biology with an emphasis in Neurobiology, Behavior and Physiology, on his way to a MD/Phd program starting in Fall of 2019. His first degree was in Physics which he earned at Arizona State University. During his first semester back in school, his Microbiology lab was the first time he realized that learning about the unseen world of living organisms was going to be a passion that would provide a driving force for years to come. His future aspirations lie in providing our society with medical tools that will give more power to individuals over their personal health. His personal hobbies and interests include growing mushrooms for local farmers markets and working on his 1976 Westfalia VW Bus.
Christina Smith
Christina Smith is a third year biomedical engineering student, minoring in mathematics at Arizona State University. She has been working as an undergraduate researcher at the Haynes lab for the past year. Her future goal is to incorporate more engineering principles into the field of microbiology and synthetic biology. She has learned a lot about quorum sensing and project design through the iGEM team and is very excited about what the future of bioengineering holds. Outside of the lab, she works at a dine-in movie theater, binge watches crime TV series on Netflix , and is an enthusiast landscape painter.
Xylaan Livingstone
Xylaan Livingstone is a third-year genetics major attending Arizona State University. Since a young age he has always had a passion with making an impact on helping the world and feels through sciences it is truly possible. He is very excited to be a part of this year’s iGEM team, where he feels this a perfect environment to meet like minds and help further the world’s knowledge on the unknown. Outside of the lab, Xylaan enjoys listening to rap music, martial arts, and learning new trades.
Graduate Mentors
Stefan Tekel
Stefan Tekel is PhD student from northern Virginia and is currently researching chromatin protein engineering and drug delivery. He received his B.S. in biotechnology from James Madison University in 2012, and started at Arizona State University in the Biological Design program in 2013. Stefan enjoys watching DC sports, cooking, and playing hockey in his free time.
Alyssa Henning
Alyssa is a Ph.D. student in the ASU Biological Design graduate program and is a member of Dr. Karmella Haynes' lab. She is also participating in the Responsible Innovation in Science, Engineering, and Society (RISES) certificate program under Dr. Emma Frow's mentorship and will include a science policy research chapter in her dissertation. She was a member of Cornell University's first iGEM team, participated in iGEM in 2009 and 2010, and has volunteered as an iGEM judge since 2012. She is also a member of the iGEM Diversity Committee and a co-director of the iGEM Mentorship Program. Prior to graduate school, she was a wetware intern at Ginkgo BioWorks. When she's not in the lab, you can find her drumming with Sun Devil Taiko and helping to organize events as the external outreach director for ASU's Rainbow Coalition for LGBTQ+ students
Faculty Advisor
Primary PI: Dr. Karmella Haynes
Karmella Haynes earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at Washington University, St. Louis. Her postdoctoral training focused on designing bacterial DNA for mathematical applications (Davidson College) and engineering synthetic proteins to control human cell fates (Harvard Medical School).
Dr. Emma Frow
Emma Frow joined Arizona State University in February 2015 as an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. Emma received her BA in Natural Sciences (Neuroscience) and her PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK. She spent two years working as a subeditor for Nature in London, and then re-trained in the social sciences, gaining an MSc in Science & Technology Studies from the University of Edinburgh. She completed postdoctoral research at the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, before returning to Edinburgh in 2012 as an Assistant Professor in Science, Technology & Innovation Studies. Her research focuses on standards and governance in contemporary life sciences, with a particular focus on synthetic biology. She is currently working with colleagues in Edinburgh on a project called ‘Engineering Life’ (funded by the European Research Council), exploring the movement of ideas, promises and practices from engineering into the life sciences. She also serves as co-chair of Policy & Practices for the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
Dr. Jeremy Mills
Jeremy Mills is an Assistant Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences and The Center for Molecular Design and Biomimetics in The Biodesign Institute. He obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Vanderbilt University where he studied free radical atom transfer reactions with Prof. Ned Porter. He then carried out graduate studies focused on protein engineering with natural and unnatural amino acids at The Scripps Research Institute under the guidance of Prof. Peter Schultz. He comes to ASU from the University of Washington where he carried out postdoctoral studies in the field of computational protein design with Prof. David Baker. Research in the Mills group focuses on the use of computational protein design methods to engineer proteins in which non-canonical amino acids carry out important functions.
Dr. David Nielsen
Dr. David Nielsen joined Arizona State University in August 2009 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy. Prior to joining ASU Dr. Nielsen was a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, Dr. Nielsen obtained both his Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University at Kingston (Canada) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, respectively.
Dr. Xiao Wang
Dr. Xiao Wang earned his Ph.D. in 2006 from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while earning his BS. in 2000 from Tongji University in China. Dr. Xiao Wang’s lab is interested in understanding and exploiting the effects of nonlinear dynamics and stochasticity in engineered gene networks in microbes, and extrapolating this knowledge to the understanding of cell differentiation and development in higher organisms.synthetic multistable gene networks, systems biology on small network motifs with feedbacks, role of noise in cell differentiation and development, molecular evolution
