Team Members

Alexander Gillan

Wet Lab, Dry Lab, Education

“Alexander is an incredibly passionate chemist and first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate, and I love listening to him talk about obscure science facts, which I consistently ask for as an avid fan of his yap” – Darren Sim (quote not altered in any way, shape, or form)

Amitan Joseph

Dry Lab, Wiki, Education

Amitan is a first year Engineering undergraduate. He does all things dry lab, but maybe he’ll get to use a pipette for the first time. He loves watching Glee in his free time, when he’s not accidentally DDOSing miRNA databases.

Cassandra Lui

Wet Lab, Human Practices, Education

Cassandra is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. Outside of biology, she enjoys the Numberjacks character One, sesame seeds and graphic design. She owes everyone sweet treats for oversleeping and missing three hours of a meeting once.

Darren Sim

Wet Lab, Extraction

darren is a fish made to climb trees (and a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate)

Joaquin Anjarwalla

Wet lab, Dry Lab

Joaquin (Kim) is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. He likes food, cooking, and the gym. He is also the resident team caffeine addict and in-house dry lab translator.

Kelda Lee

Wet Lab, Education

Kelda is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. She enjoys singing, playing the ukulele and baking as her hobbies. Also the team’s Director of Creative Visuals.

Molly Dorricot

Wet Lab, Education

Molly is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. She also has a passion for drawing dying, phosphate deficient arabidopsis and has healthy interest in the funding of the team.

Paul Vongtanakiat

Wet Lab

Paul is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. He likes staying in his room and stresses out about our project with a stress on plant nutrient stress.

Steven Sun

Wet Lab

Steven is a first year Biological Natural Sciences undergraduate. He is devoted to the art of magnetic bead extractions (which we ended up not using) and the completely unrelated business of musical theatre.

PIs

Jarrod Shilts

Jarrod Shilts is a research Group Leader who brings over a decade of iGEM experience as a competition judge, team-founder, and former participant. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and subsequently helped spin-out a biotech company. His work currently focuses on developing protein technologies that support the creation of new therapeutics.

Somenath Bakshi

Somenath Bakshi is an Associate Professor interested in quantitative microbiology. He did his PhD in University of Wisconsin Madison developing super-resolution imaging technologies to study central cellular processes in microbes. Though most of his work has focused on developing methods and approaches to synthetic biology, he remains interested in quantifying the dynamics and control of natural circuits.

Main Instructor

Gabriele Cannucciari

  • First year PhD student at the Department of Chemistry
  • Co-president of the Cambridge University Synthetic Biology Society (2025-present)

Exploring gene delivery methods for mammalian and plant gene editing.

Instructors

Kavi Shah

  • PhD Student at the Department of Genetics
  • President of the Cambridge University Synthetic Biology Society (2023-2025)

Studying in vivo directed evolution strategies for optimising strains and proteins. Works with bacteriophage, bacteria and yeast, alongside computational modelling and hardware design. Coordinated the iGEM team for the past few years and really enjoyed supporting the team with their project!

Anqi Yu

  • PhD Student at the Department of pharmacology
  • Former iGEMer
  • Co-president of the Cambridge University Synthetic Biology Society (2025-present)

Currently developing drugs against bacteria. Interested in solving real-life problems with biotechnology.

Weizhuo Chen (Emily)

  • PhD student at the University of Cambridge specializing in pathology.

Advisor

Honghao Su

Honghao is an incoming research associate in peptide and protein design at the University of Bristol. He did his PhD in plant synthetic biology and has been instructing iGEM teams for four years. In his free time, he indulges in brainrots with his advisees.