Attributions

Our Team

Montgomery iGEM seeks to spread the message of scientific research, exploration, and discovery as well as inspire students to pursue STEM careers. In order to do this, we try to immerse students as much as possible in all procedures and limit adviser/instructor participation to a bare minimum. This is not to say that our adviser/instructor was not crucial in the successes our team has achieved, but only to say that the vast majority of our accomplishments are the direct result of our members' hard work.

Research and Development

Our Research and Development Team, also known as R&D, works directly on the scientific side of our research. From the beginning of our competition season, they have been working hard to devise, and work through a project. From the months of January to February, the R&D team was carefully selected from all of the members based on their expertise and experience in synthetic and general biology. From there, the R&D team has worked diligently on proposing many projects of interest. Between the projects suggested, such as nicotine addiction control, stress relief, photosynthetic facilitation and others, we decided to go with Pankti Kothari's idea of acne reduction.

After the R&D team chose the project track and idea, we worked hard to develop mechanisms of action pertaining to acne reduction. As you can see from our project page, we made many changes before finally settling upon our final solution. Our big break came by one day in May, when members Neha Chhugani, Yuan He and Pankti Kothari confirmed that our final proposed method would indeed facilitate the reduction of acne.

From there, we began laboratory procedures. Many of our members contributed to these challenges and we are proud to say that our advisor did not have any direct contact with the lab. All procedures were carried out by students, with our advisor guiding us through the process. Thus, throughout the course of this year, our R&D members have become trained lab members in the processes associated with Synthetic Biology.

Public Relations

As a first year club and organization, there were many administrative tasks to be handled in building up the structure. Our Public Relations Team worked hard to make sure that our club could run smoothly and efficiently. Managing all aspects of administration from logo design to financing, our PR Team is an integral part of Montgomery iGEM and also exposes people with different interests to STEM organizations. Our PR and Tech team has been successful in putting together fundraisers for this year's registration and material costs. They are also our liaison to the community and district. We hope that in future years, we can become more involved in presentations through our Board of Education. While we have not significantly advocated our club within our community this year, it is something we plan to work on over the summer and in future years. So far, the Public Relations Team has done a phenomenal job in keeping our team afloat through sending out emails, keeping members updated and managing the team's finances. PR Team member Tiffany Lin was the sole designer and creator of our team logo featured on our website.

Technology

You may have noticed this extremely clean and modern web design. This is all attributed to the hard work our Technology Team has accomplished. We are proud to say that all of the web elements were hand coded and done solely by the students. In the beginning of the season, we boarded out our website design and had members of the team contribute what their vision of the website would be. After weeks and months of deliberation, coding, and debugging, we have pulled together this final product. With tremendous contributions from Casey Chow, Lucy Zhang, David Fan and Sarah Oh, this website embodies the pride we take in our team and reflects the professional attitude Montgomery iGEM seeks to advocate. We did not consult any professional programmers and have learned a lot through experimenting with the MediaWiki syntax.

Operations

Our Operations Team was extremely instrumental in the documentation of events, including our laboratory notebook. The majority of our website content was written directly by members of the Operations Team. This team makes sure that we communicate our achievements, learned lessons and image for all in the iGEM community. In fact, they have played a monumental role in raising awareness of the growing STEM program at Montgomery High School as a result of iGEM. The Operations Team made sure that all articles written on our website were accurate and grammatically correct (a more challenging feat than expected).

Photography

Aside from our cited photos taken from the internet, our team photographs are all taken by students on the team. Photographers Emily Ma, Joanna Li and Shannon Lu have worked tirelessly to capture the environment and work that our team has done through digital documentation. Throughout the year, they have captured not only the fun carefree moments of team bonding, but also the scientific lab work performed by our R&D team.