Meet the UBC BIOMOD Jamboree Team
Amir Meysami Fard
Cell Culture Master
Amir has a smile and energy brighter than our Top Fluor Cholesterol fluorophore. He works hard at the cell culture work to grow our baby bEND3 and U251 cells into maturity. He enjoys listening to Kanye West, and eating Persian food. Amir is the definition of motivation and perseverance; without him many of our experiments would have failed.
Ileana Co
Co-Captain
Ileana, also known as the “mango monster”, is one of the fearless leaders of the UBC BIOMOD team using her love of mangoes and cute puppies to defeat the evil cancer cells! Ileana has superpowers of magically making bread appear out of thin air as well as disappearing from class to work on BIOMOD instead :). You can often find her delivering the team supplies between buildings while taking care of the baby BIOMOD cells.
Nathan Chan
Chan-Captain
Nathan Chan is the man with a plan. In his spare time, he likes looking up deals for cheap pipettes and if there are loads of free samples, you can almost always find Nathan trying to hoard a few to test out. Besides finding him near your local Costco, Nathan tries to burn all of the calories obtained from chocolates and candies by biking, running, swimming, and yelling at Edward. Without him, we would not have a CHANce
Tatjana Stone
Video Master
Tatjana has been the team’s long-distance wonder worker. Her weapon of choice is a stylus and a tablet. With it, she is able to create amazing works of art as featured in our awesome video. She also helps secure sponsors and forage for team funding. Tatjana enjoys photography and getting co-op jobs that are far away from Vancouver.
Lena Choi
Graphical Specialist
Lena would be any team’s CHOIce for a graphics specialist and website developer. Despite being a new git user, she is already better than most computer science students out there. Lena adds great value to the team and her opinions are highly valued. Lena enjoys photography and karate.
Edward Wang
EGF Man
Edward, Eddie, or EGF guy is the man responsible for making our cancer curing liposomes! In his spare time, Edward loves sifting through large amounts of data performing data analysis and calculations on the bus late at night, while being yelled at constantly by Nathan.
Will Xi
Modelling
Will is the team’s silent-killer. He works on the protein-protein models, learning new modelling techniques and silently slaying Z-dock and Chimera.
Lily Takeuchi
Lab Dweller
Lily is a busy body who gets things done exceptionally well all the time. Despite working in three different labs and saving the world, she will always greet you with a cheery “hello!”. Lily enjoys running, biking, hiking, and her allergy restrictions only allow her to safely consume chicken nuggets.
Meet the talented people who helped make it happen
Angel Chu
Wet lab
Angel is a funny gal
Anusika Nijher
Video
The video saviour from afar
Sam Lee
Video
The video saviour from afar
Chanpreet Mangat
Wet lab
Chanpreet is the style maestro of BIOMOD. The ultimate Drake fan, she also enjoys reading books and going to Shakespearean theatres
Jeff Boschman
Karateka
Did you hear that? It's the sound of my KIAO POW!
Rika Sugimoto
Video
Hello!
Valerie Chu
Wet lab
Valerie is the most generous on the team, always offering to share her beers
Derek Chan
Website
Derek is a handsome and muscular individual, also known as dchanman. A karate champion turned website master, he now karate chops the BIOMOD competition.
Tyra Phillips
Wet Lab
Tyra went to UBCO in her first year. She has made much better life choices since then. She's a great swimmer, country dancer, and definitely not afraid of blood. If the lab was ever a dangerous place, Tyra would be the one to keep things safe.
The graduate and post-doctoral students
Our project would not be possible without the invaluable input of the graduate and post-doctoral students. We sincerely thank the following for their advice and expertise throughout the project!
- Dr. Nat Brown for his expertise in Cellomics high-content screening and analysis
- Dr. Miriam Kotzler for her expertise in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) analysis
- Dr. Mina Ordobadi for her expertise in Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) and liposome drug delivery systems
- Dr. Maxence LeVasseur for his overall guidance and advice in cell culture experiments
- Dr. Wu Chey Sin for her guidance in cell culture experiments and provision of bEND3 and U251 cell lines
- Dr. Nestor Solis for his expertise in Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS)
Thank you very much to our faculty sponsors for providing the UBC BIOMOD 2016 team with the laboratory space, supervision and advice to help the team accomplish our goals for the competition!
Acknowledgements
We would also like to thank the following individuals for their support in the development of our project:
- Dr. Shyh-Dar Li
- Dr. Stephen Withers
- Dr. Marco Ciufolini
- Dr. Pieter Cullis
- Andrew Wieczore and the Hallam Lab
- Grace Tharmarajah and Rebecca deSouza
- Moe Wehbe and Gemma Ryan
- Julia Varela, Carmen Bayly and Sonal Ayakar of the UBC Chem. and Biological Engineering Dept.
- Kelvin Hau and Tim Hollenberg