Team:Wisconsin-Madison/teamadvisors

Brian Pfleger PhD.:

Brian F. Pfleger: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, 2007-present with appointment in Biomedical Engineering. He received his PhD after studying in the laboratory of Jay D. Keasling at Cal-Berkeley where he developed metabolic engineering methods to enhance the biosynthesis of pharmaceuticals. This experience trained him to design, construct and evaluate strains of Escherichia coli for the production of small molecules by integrating synthetic and systems biology. After graduating, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship (NIH-GLRCE) in the laboratory of David H. Sherman at the University of Michigan, where he studied six Bacillus anthracis enzymes and how they assembled a complex natural product essential for iron acquisition and pathogenesis. Research in the Sherman lab exposed him to the combinatorial nature of natural product biosynthesis and taught him how to work with these novel enzymes. His current interest is engineering sustainable chemical production using synthetic biology.

Tyler Youngquist:

I am a senior at University of Wisconsin-Madison majoring in Microbiology and Life Science Communication. My research interest is in applying microbiology to public health related fields such as monitoring antibiotic resistance in a waste water treatment plant. I have also written science articles for the college newspaper that pertain to student health issues and research around the campus. This is my second year on the iGEM team. Fun Fact: The picture was taken at the hockey rink inside Camp Randall.

John De Friel:

John De Friel is a senior in the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UW-Madison focusing on computational and experimental approaches to systems and synthetic biology. In his computational work, he develops and analyzes genome-scale metabolic models of bacteria. These models are used for determining genetic engineering strategies of bacteria to increase their production of bio-fuels or the degradation of environmental contaminants. His experimental work has focused on using synthetic biology to develop bio-sensors for petroleum products and working in a genomics laboratory to sequence and analyze the genome of Pseudomonas fluorescens L5.1-96.