iGEM News

iGEM 2022 wins Gold!

This year was the first time in two years that the competition was in-person, and the first time the competition was held out of the country. Virginia iGEM 2022 had the opportunity to travel to Paris, France to present their project AtheroSHuffle: A Novel Point-of-Care Detection for Early Atherosclerosis. This was the 16th consecutive year Virginia has participated in iGEM, and this year, Team Virginia competed against 346 teams from around the world. The team was nominated for Best Diagnostic Project and awarded a gold medal for their efforts. 

Read the Biology Department's article here!

Representing the team are (Left to right, front row) Yilun Zhou, Marisa Guajardo, Isha Patel, Alyssa Dioguardi, Miranda Khoury, Peneeta Wojcik, (back row) Godwin Oluwafemi, Yasir Mahboba, Jayati Maram, Professor Kozminski, Ivory Tang, Justin Orchard-Hayes, and Alex Heise.

iGEM 2021 wins Silver

In this year’s iGEM's Virtual Giant Jamboree in November 2021, Virginia iGEM was awarded a Silver Medal for their innovative project in metabolic engineering: Manifold. Competing against almost 250 teams from around the world, the Virginia iGEM team completed a comprehensive design, laboratory plan, outreach components, and extensive math modeling work. This was the 15th consecutive year UVA has participated in the worldwide competition. Their project, Manifold, was highlighted in the following UVAToday article: https://news.virginia.edu/content/magical-superfluid-synthetic-biology-students-excel-nanotechnology

Representing UVA were: (from left to right, back row) Joel Valliath, Christopher Nguyen, Victor Jian, Collin Marino, Professor Kozminski, David Bass, Robby Phillips, (front row) Nikki Akula, Annie An, Allison Kumar, Maria Lyons. Unpictured: Randy Andurkar.
 

iGEM 2020 Wins Gold!

In iGEM's first ever Virtual Giant Jamboree in November 2020, Virginia iGEM was awarded a Gold Medal for their innovative project in metabolic engineering: Manifold. Competing against almost 250 teams from around the world, the Virginia iGEM team had to find ways to complete their research and project development almost completely online, but managed to come out with a comprehensive design, labratory plan, outreach components, and extensive math modeling work. This was the 14th consecutive year UVA has participated in the worldwide competition, but the 1st year that was done remotely, as well as the 1st opportunity to start a 2-year track project in the iGEM Competition. The 2021 Virginia iGEM Team has plans to continue developing Manifold, both in refining the design and completing the lab work that was planned by the 2020 Team. The hope is to create a prototype of the Manifold device, test it, and gather data to compare to the math modeling work before the competition this year. 

Representing UVA were Julia Ball, Collin Marino, Jacob Polzin, Sophia Link, Veronica Guttierez, Dev Patel, Aparna Kola, Colin Haws, Eddie Micklovic, Pietro Revelli, and Apekchha Pradhan. The Virginia iGEM advisors are Profs. Keith Kozminski (Biology) and Jason Papin (Biomedical Engineering).

Team Manifold Conducts Virtual Research

This year’s team is the 14th Virginia iGEM team to compete in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, the Giant Jamboree, following a legacy of successful teams and their inventive synthetic biology solutions. Under the guidance of our advisors, Professor Papin and Professor Kozminski (Biomedical Engineering and Biology Departments, respectively), Virginia iGEM has consistently received recognition at the competition, as well as seeding biotech startups Agrospheres INC and Transfoam LLC. Along with a strong reputation to live up to, the 2020 Team has been incredibly resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.