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Aarushi Bellani
BSc Biological Sciences
Aarushi is a vegetarian that hates most vegetables. She has a hobby of making people around her fill out the MBTI personality test. And, she has possibly the cutest sushi cat sweater in the history of the world.
Aarushi is a committed member of the wet lab team and contributed lots of time to designing experiments and analysing the data. She had more prior wet lab experience than most of us and guided the rest of the team through lots of headaches.
Daniela Dana Danilova
BSc Microbiology
Dana has the craziest lab coat SAFB has ever seen. After a long day in the lab, she’ll be better at making puns than setting agar plates. She has a wonderful collection of microbe plushies that have become a crucial part of our day-to-day iDEC experience. She has kept us from being locked out of the lab after hours (when card access expires) countless times. She also devours ungodly amounts of breakfast bars.
She has been an instrumental part of the wet lab team from day one and has shown immense dedication to the project, sacrificing countless hours to be in labs and study spaces with us. She has kept us sharp by always questioning our methods (in a good way) and making sure that we’ve thought through every step of the way.
David Tsang
MEng Design Engineering
David the Wiki Wizard had been living abroad this summer and contributed remotely from all over the world, braving the different time zones and wifi conditions. Unable to enter the UK due to COVID, he used his crazy genius coding skills to help set up the wiki and help with dry lab. But since he’s arrived at London, he’s become a regular at wet lab meetings and has shared the stress of iDEC deadlines with us.
Isabelle Zhang
BSc Biochemistry
Isabelle consistently supplies the team with morale and snacks (not to be confused with her incredibly realistic toast phone case). She has the most adorable nods.
As team leader she coordinated the funding and drove the team to be resourceful and proactive. She was deeply involved in experimental planning and design for both wet lab and dry lab. She managed much of the team’s organisation and navigated us through many obstacles and unforeseen circumstances.
Juan Ivars Miñana
MRes Bioengineering
Juan is as tall as two Aarushis stacked on top of each other (the standard unit for measuring height in the iDEC team). He is as competent as he is tall, and certainly more competent than most cells we’ve made.
He bravely led the dry lab team through the scary unknowns of structure prediction and ligand docking, and somehow managed to do all this whilst also writing his Master’s dissertation. He gave the wet lab team promising information from all sorts of bioinformatics analyses.
Kexin Xu
BSc Medical Biosciences
Kexin carries her badminton racket with her everywhere, including into the lab, to fight off the evil spirits of smeared gels. She also bikes everywhere, including in the lab, to get from the centrifuge to the fume hood across the hall.
She started off keen to do wet lab work, but has since become our resident bioinformatics girl. She picked up Python skills at amazing speed (only learning it this summer), and enthusiastically coded most of the scripts we used.
Laima Šusta
BSc Biochemistry
Laima does the best impressions of our PhD advisors. She’s also named after a Latvian chocolate bar, or is the chocolate bar named after her? Laima means happiness in Latvian, and that’s exactly what she brings to the team (in the form of Estonian sweets).
She has been a significant member of the wet lab team. She joined us as a first year undergraduate and will be leaving us with enough PCR and cloning experience to lecture about them to second and third years. She designed the wiki that you’re reading right now, and made our advisors very happy by volunteering to do many of the lab’s chores.
Sifeng Lucy Chen
BSc Biochemistry
Caffeine runs through Lucy’s veins. She likes drawing on large vertical surfaces and carries an army of markers so that she is prepared for any surface she comes across. She has somehow gotten away with breaking into the Hackspace every day for over a month (her ID card did not work (we still don’t know if it does)).
She has been a dedicated leader of the wet lab team, bringing her superb researching skills to the table. She kept the team on track with her detailed lab notebook full of calculations and concentrations, and contributed greatly to experimental planning and design.
