Team:MIT/Team

Meet Our Awesome Team!

Click on the characters in the picture to discover our team!

MIT's 2020 iGEM Team is a diverse group of 4 MIT students, 1 JHU student, and 1 Phillips Academy High School student. We are working on a project on immunomodulation to combat the cytokine storm induced by COVID-19 using engineered mammalian cells.

Team Members

Ethan Levy
Sangita Vasikaran
Erin Kim
Rachel Shen
Erin Shin
Stuti Khandwala

Mentors

Miles George
Dr. Ron Weiss
Dr. Deepak Mishra
Malik George
Melody Wu
Ben Allsup
Kristina Stoyanova

Meet our Team Members

Ethan Levy

Ethan Levy is a freshman at Johns Hopkins University studying biomedical and electrical engineering. He joined iGEM as an opportunity to learn and contribute more to the medical field in the future. Interested in bioengineering and synthetic biology, he hopes to explore the applications of electrical engineering to the field of biomedicine. Outside of research he is usually found taking long walks (often on the beach) or making memes.

Sangita Vasikaran

Sangita Vasikaran is a sophmore majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Design. She joined iGEM to be a part a global community of doers, as well as to ideate with creative, kind people. She is intrigued by the intersection of biotech and the human experience–be it through nature-inspired materials and art, the future of food, or bioethics. Sangita is an EMT with MIT EMS, helps organize Cellular Agriculture @ MIT and the Huang-Hobbs Biomakerspace student group, and loves to cook (currently pursuing breads from across the world!).

Meet our Mentors

Dr. Ron Weiss, Ph. D.

Ron Weiss is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology. He has been engaged in synthetic biology research since 1996 when he was a graduate student at MIT and where he helped set up a wet-lab in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. After completion of his PhD, Weiss joined the faculty at Princeton University, and recently returned to MIT to take on a tenured faculty position in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Dr. Deepak Mishra, Ph. D.

Deepak Mishra is a NSF Graduate Fellow in MIT Biological Engineering and a Ph.D. student in Ron Weiss' Synthetic Biology Group. Prior to MIT, Deepak earned a B.Sc. in chemical engineering with a biomolecular engineering emphasis at Caltech. Deepak enjoys teaching immensely and has been involved in teaching 3 undergraduate/graduate academic courses, mentored 46 students across 3 iGEM teams to date, and directly supervised several master’s thesis students and undergraduate researchers. His research interests lie in the use of protein-protein interactions within synthetic biology both alone and in concert with other regulatory modalities for sophisticated circuit design.

Malik George

Malik George is a junior at MIT majoring in Biological Engineering and planning to minor in Africa and African Diaspora Studies. In high school, he worked with and bred zebrafish, fruit flies, and mice in to learn about conditioning and its effect on behavior. He is interested in the relationship between an organism’s genetic makeup and its resulting phenotype. Malik was eager to be a part of the 2019 iGEM team and is excited to mentor the 2020 iGEM team, where he can both learn and teach molecular and synthetic biology and communication skills. Besides iGEM, he is a member of The Standard, the Black Student's Union, and Nu Delta fraternity. He enjoys playing a wide variety of games with his friends as well as discussing superhero movies and lore.

Ben Allsup

Ben Allsup is a first-year graduate student studying Biological Engineering at MIT. He completed his undergraduate studying Biomedical Engineering and Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). There, he worked as an undergraduate researcher and Green Fellow investigating potential gene-based therapeutics for autoimmune disorders and characterizing novel immune checkpoint blockade inhibitors for use in cancer treatments. At UTD, Ben was involved in several educational outreach initiatives through his roles as the president of the university’s Biomedical Engineering Society chapter, a peer tutor, and a volunteer with Engineering World Health.

Melody Wu

Melody Wu is a junior majoring in Biological Engineering and minoring in design at MIT. In 2016, she participated in iGEM as project manager of her high school team, Alverno, researching methods to reduce the effects of supercoiling in multi-genetic bacterial circuits. At MIT, she works in the Housman lab identifying genetic modifiers for Huntington’s. She joined MIT’s 2019 iGEM team because it was a valuable learning experience in 2016. She now is an After iGEM 2020 North America Ambassador. Outside of the lab, she enjoys creating art to visually explain the jargon of science (but also just for fun) and trying new foods from around the world. She loves thinking about global sustainability and development as part of MIT’s living-learning community iHouse.

Miles George

Miles George is a junior at MIT studying Biological Engineering and minoring in African and African Diaspora Studies. He was enrolled in his high school science research course for 3 years, focusing on a different biological model organism each year. His junior year mouse study was an extensive epigenetic and behavioral study. Doing research contributed much to his dream of being a biological engineer in a research lab. One of his goals is to spread scientific awareness to the world. He joined the iGEM team as a freshman to learn more about the field of synthetic biology. His hobbies include deceitful board games, trivia, and tennis. He is also a part of the Nu Delta fraternity, The Black Students’ Union, and The Standard.

Kristina Stoyanova

2nd year Computer Science and Biology Student at Caltech

Kristina is a sophomore at Caltech studying computer science and biology. She joined iGEM fascinated by synthetic biology, the wet lab, and cloning. After she discovered biological simulations, she became interested in working on computational biology models. Outside of the lab, you can find her watching Avatar the Last Airbender with friends or voice acting in animations.