Simon Koplev

Systems Biology Engineering

I always wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to travel and uncoil the unknown corridors of space itself. As my envisioned future gradually decayed and steadily got replaced by the grim and earth-bound realities of scholarship, I found myself still gazing towards stellar things. If I could still see them, that is. Eyesight was never a prime attribute due to heavy book-reading. It was at this point in time that I fell in love with the art of pipetting and working long hours in slightly unexplored corners of just about any laboratory, furiously and with great care moving small amounts of liquids from one container to another. As for know this constitutes enough reason for existence, refraining me from killing myself in a freak-space-rocket accident.

Damian Rafal Plichta

Systems Biology Engineering

I always wanted to save the world. Easy said, difficult to do. After all, what does it really mean? Saving the environment from pollution, or eradicating famine, or maybe obliterating poverty... At some point I became interested in biology and genetic engineering, which seems to be a good starting point. With the cutting edge techniques and applications, modern biology offers immense possibilities for improving the quality of life for humankind. I want to contribute to it. Why not to do iGEM then? With all the crazy ideas people are having, this competition brings you to a new level of realization of what can be done.

Lars Roed Ingerslev

Systems Biology Engineering

I will freely admit that I have always been a bit of a science geek. Initially physics was the dream, I wanted to go to space (and preferably build the rocket myself), but sometime during my high school studies, my interest in planets and black holes was diminished and the workings of the cell became the focus of my affection.

So what better way to go than studying Biotechnology? That was where I met what has become my other academic interest: statistics and data analysis. Fortunately modern biology is full of data and there is plenty of room for people who want to spend hours in front of the computer, analyzing the latest high-throughput genome sequencing experiment.

Jing Zhao

Biotechnology Engineering

Believe it or not, my dream is to become artist or writer. The reason why I choose Biotechnology as my major is that I also interested in science and want to solve problems such as energy, environment and human health with this technology in the future. Fortunately, I can take part in IGEM and it is a very special experience for me to know a lot of friends and learn knowledge at the same time.

Helle Krogh Pedersen

Systems Biology Engineering

As a naive highscholer I wanted to save the world, to make the world a better place. I wanted to save millions of lives by being the one inventing the AIDS vaccine, finding the cure for Alzheimer or eliminating malaria. Full of hope I started at uni, just to experience that the simple “DNA” and “protein” appeared to be much more complex and I slowly started to realize that saving the world is not something you just do after studying biology for half a year. This realization was combined with frustrating, but time passed, good things happened and suddenly I found myself in the middle of a fascinating iGEM project. It will not save the world tomorrow, but it might be one of the many small steps which in the future will lead to groundbreaking scientific discoveries.

Anna Lewińska

Systems Biology Engineering

Do the words such as “mystery”, “unknown” make you excited? Do you wonder how it will be to wander in the labyrinths of forgotten places? Don’t you want to unravel all the secrets? If so you are exactly like me. I always wanted to be like Indiana Jones or Sherlock Holmes. However, as the real life came it pulled me down to earth. But still I found a field that is very close to my dream. It was of course, molecular biology. It seems like a maze with a lot of dead-ends, but when you managed to find the right path and solve all the puzzles, there is a huge treasure awaiting for you. That is why, long hours in laboratory or reading fascinatingly.

Helge Munk Jacobsen

Software Engineering

Okay, I admit it! I have no clue what this synthetic biology is all about. I don’t know what RNA is, and I can’t tell you what protein has to do with it. But, what I do know, is how to redesign a wiki page, and how to present complicated academical stuff in a way that is easy to understand. And the fact that I don’t have any kind of biotech knowledge actually just made this task a lot easier.

Chris Workman

Associate Professor, Center for Biological Sequence Analysis

Dr. Workman is a group leader of Regulatory Genomics and has twelve years of combined biotech industry and post-graduate experience. This includes three years of postdoctoral training under Dr. Trey Ideker at the department of Bioengineering, UC San Diego and five years under Søren Brunak at CBS in the department of DTU-Systems Biology. Dr. Workman has developed a number of bioinformatic tools and analysis methods that support research in transcriptional regulation. He has extensive experience analyzing gene expression microarray data and has contributed as a developer for the Cytoscape open source project.

Mogens Kilstrup

Professor, Center for Systems Microbiology

Mogens Kilstrup received his master degree in 1986 in biochemistry from the University of Copenhagen as well as his PhD degree in Molecular biology in 1992. After a Post doctoral position at DTU from 1993, he was appointed as associate professor in 2000 and advanced to professor in 2008 at Center for Systems Microbiology (CSM) at DTU.

Professor Kilstrup´s areas of expertise include gene regulation, microbial physiology, and molecular biology, with emphasis on medically and industrial important bacteria as Salmonella enterica, Escherichia coli and Lactococcus lactis using both genetic and DNA recombinant techniques. Special expertise is found in the area of stress response and the genetics and physiology of nucleotide metabolism. Current major research project is the analysis of global regulatory networks (stress response) in L. lactis, including physiological studies, proteomics (2D-gel electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry), transcriptomics (transcriptional analysis using DNA Microarray), and biochemical characterization of regulatory systems. He is the author or co-author of more than 25 scientific papers that have been cited more than 900 times, and has international collaboration with a number of scientific groups.

Sébastien Lemire

Post.doc., Center for Systems Microbiology

Sébastien arrived in Denmark in May 2009 after a PhD in the lab of Lionelllo Bossi in Gif-Sur-Yvette, France and 2 years of post.doc in the lab of Tetsuro Yonesaki at Osaka University, Japan. He has also worked in the USA during his masters degree and there the virus for phages infected him and he got interested in the genetics approach to biological questions. He is especially interested in the regulation of lysogeny in Salmonella prophages and how those phages contribute to Salmonella virulence.