Berkeley Engineering Blogs

I cannot believe that school starts on Wednesday… Summer break passed so fast and iGEM comp team will be kicked out from the office soon. Our classes will start, but we will continue working on our projects, alone… randomly meeting around the campus, and meeting weekly to see each other and to give updates…

Let me introduce myself. My name is Nina Revko. I am a senior in Bioengineering graduating in December. This is my last semester of college, which makes me sad and glad at the same time. I am a community college transfer student and two years at Berkeley passed so fast. I should admit that getting into iGEM this summer was one of my greatest experiences. It gave me clarity and understanding of what I thought Bioengineering had been like when I selected this field, it closed the gap by bridging chemistry and biology with engineering, it also showed me an ideal setting of perfectly selected working conditions when I was happy to come to work each day. And it is not over yet… I am happy!

Through the first part of summer I was working on the automation plugin for the assembly manager, then my project shifted to include workflows with Kepler, and for the last month, together with Thien, I have been collaborating with Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). While other members of the team have been struggling with migrating and upgrading old Clotho to new Clotho, Thien and I have been working on coding and brainstorming of several new algorithms for oligodesign and assembly. In the coming months before Jamboree (if time permits) we also want to incorporate Clotho with Biostream-a protocol language, created by Microsoft in India.

So, the official iGEM time is over, but it does not mean that we will stop working on the projects…

Long time since my last post, no?

I bring you all pictures that I’ve accumulated thus far from the iGEM Jamboree. I’m hoping to add a few more pictures to the album later once we get more pictures of the computational team (us!) and just pictures around MIT.

http://picasaweb.google.com/naderadez/IGEM#

Stay tuned.

After a long day of talking about our project, we just found out a few hours ago that we are one of the six finalist teams! We will join Caltech, Freiburg, Harvard, NYMU-Taipei, and Slovenia in presenting again tomorrow to all of the iGEM participants. After all of the practice that we have had in the past two days with presenting, answering questions, and presenting our poster, we are prepared to put on a good presentation this year. Unlike last year when the Berkeley team’s participants and instructors needed to significantly revise their presentation between Saturday and Sunday, we only had to make a couple of minor changes and we are set to go. As a result, everyone is able to relax, party, sleep, or do whatever they please.

Our presentation today clearly went very well. The interest level seemed high and the types of questions that people asked us indicated that they not only understood what we did, but also that they thought what we were doing was useful (we had questions about whether and how our system would be compatible with similar lab procedures that others may use). After we finished our presentation and Q&A, we could just see how pleased Chris, Terry, and Jin were with how everything turned out. They had been extremely supportive throughout the entire process, but it was more satisfying than ever to hear that they were content with how the presentation turned out.

Today has been a very exciting and rewarding day, but without a doubt it has left most of us quite tired (as I type from Bing & Aron’s hotel room right now, Aron has fallen asleep on the bed right behind me). I myself am quite exhausted from all the talking and standing up that I did throughout the day today. I am going to sign off in favor of resting up and getting ready for an exhilarating and eventful day tomorrow. I am excited to see what happens and I hope that tomorrow will be just as rewarding and satisfying as today!