At this year’s iGEM World Competition the 2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM team were runners up for human practices, and one of the top 16 teams in the world out of 190 total teams; only four of which came from the US. With support from the Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium and the California Space Grant Consortium, the group of thirteen undergraduates and recent graduates worked across three thousand miles, four time zones, and the guidance of a host of faculty advisors, post-doctoral students, and professors, to develop synthetic biology applications for astrobiology.

You can watch  a video of the iGEM competition, and see the Stanford-Brown team here.

2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM Team

(From Left to Right) Vishesh Jain (Brown), Rashmi Sharma (Stanford), Kendrick Wang (Stanford), Aaditya Shidham (Stanford), Julia Borden (Brown), Michelle Yu (Stanford), Bella Okiddy (Brown), Jason Hu (Brown), Debha Amatya (Stanford), Benjamin Geilich (Brown), Bryce Bajar (Stanford), Chris Jackson (Stanford), Gabriel Ben-Dor (Stanford)

Serving as one of the group’s faculty advisors was Dr. Lynn Rothchild, of the NASA AMES Research Center, who shared that “The 2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM team was an amazing group of enthusiastic undergraduate students from Stanford and Brown Universities who matured into a mighty synthetic biology team.  They pioneered a synthetic biology approach to understanding if there could be life in the clouds above Venus, whether humans can engineer microbes to take beyond Earth, and to do useful things such as mining for metals on other planets and asteroids. The fact that they ranked in the top 16 of 190 highly competitive teams worldwide is nothing more than what they deserved.  As their faculty advisor, I couldn’t be more proud!”

Congratulations to the team!

To learn more about the 2012 Stanford-Brown iGEM Team, click here.