Team Lead
Rebecca Zheleznyak is a senior majoring in Applied Mathematics and Biology. She is not sure what she would do in her free time due to a lack thereof. However, she would imagine that it would include finally getting through the stack of books next to her bed and finishing the list of old movies that she’s been dying to see. She also treats her phages as if they were her own kids.
Dry Lab
Olabisi Bashorun is a junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Applied Science. She is seen as the team’s IT support despite multiple claims on the difference between CS and IT. Contrary to the CS stereotype she keeps her vscode on light mode simply because she likes the contrast with her pink setup. Outside of coding you can find her doodling on the lab whiteboard.
Wet Lab
Madeline Eibner-Gebhardt is a sophomore majoring in Biology and Computational and Applied Mathematics and Statistics. She is responsible for the abundance of green bacteria (“green goo”) and grow lights that are slowly conquering the lab. When she’s not taking care of her cultures or frantically extracting nucleic acids, she enjoys reading sci-fi short stories and practicing violin.
Dry Lab
Sean Emmett is a junior majoring in Applied Mathematics and Physics. Ever since a young age, Sean has been a big fan of sports teams that wear green: luckily making him a Boston Celtics fan, sadly (but proudly) making him a New York Jets fan. Oddly enough, he did not know William & Mary’s colors were green before attending; it kinda just happened. In the real (or imaginary) free time that he has, he watches math videos, plays spikeball, and loses money in poker with his friends.
Wet Lab
Xinyu Hu is a senior majoring in Biology and minoring in Mathematics. She's a die-hard wet lab scientist who loves tinkering with genes and building plasmids. Her most-wanted 21st birthday gift is an electronic micropipette — it would finally free her from the tendon sheath cysts caused by continuously pipetting 10,000 times. Beyond research, she enjoys watching musicals and playing Tabletop Role Playing Games in her scarce spare time. She carries a D20 dice everyday as they look similar to phages, hoping it will bring a nat 20 luck to her experiments!
Wet Lab
Vandana Kalithkar is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Data science. She enjoys strange science fiction stories and comfy chairs near the lab. She is uncommonly skilled at the puzzle game, “2048”. If she is ever outside of the Integrated Science Center, she enjoys playing narrative video games with her friends while acting out the voices, cooking Indian food, and playing ultimate frisbee.
Primary PI
Dr. Saha is a developmental neurobiologist (and loves combining synthetic biology with development) and the primary advisor of the W&M iGEM Team. Her unwavering support was instrumental in the founding of the team in 2014, and in the team's continuation every year since then. She drinks 16 cups of coffee per day, much to the concern of some of her students. She insists it's all right.
Secondary PI
Dr. Bradley is chair of the Applied Science Department and has previously chaired the departments of Mathematics and Biology. He is now involved in the delivery of the new phase of the multiphase Integrated Science Center (ISC). As a practicing scientist, Dr. Bradley has a keen interest in translating modern methods and trends in STEM education and research into new facilities that will embrace both current and future practices for integrating inclusive and effective teaching, research, and collaboration opportunities.
Secondary PI
Dr. Conradi Smith is a Professor of Applied Science at William & Mary and a faculty affiliate of the Neuroscience and CAMS Mathematical Biology programs. His research applies mathematics to the life sciences, with interests ranging from cell signaling to computational neuroscience. As a secondary co-PI to the W&M iGEM Team, he helps students design and interpret mathematical models grounded in nonlinear dynamics and PDEs. He is enthusiastic about mentoring students and delights in reducing biological complexity to a dimensionless ratio of parameters.
Advisor
Caden Sanko is a PhD student currently studying at the Rice University Synthetic Biology Institute and is an advisor for William and Mary’s 2025 iGEM team. Caden is an alum of William and Mary’s Computational and Applied Mathematics and Statistics (CAMS) program and seasoned iGEMer, having worked as part of W&M’s 2024 iGEM wet-lab team.