Advisors
Interested in advising or mentoring our team?
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Associate Professor (Department of Applied Math, cross-appointed to Departments of Biology and Chemical Engineering)
Dr. Ingalls serves as the primary advisor for Waterloo iGEM’s math & modelling subteam. His research in synthetic and systems biology is focused on the development of mathematical models to predict the behavior of intracellular molecular networks and heterogeneous cellular communities.
Professor (Department of Biology) and Director of Waterloo Centre for Microbiology
Dr. Charles serves as the primary advisor for Waterloo iGEM’s lab & design subteam. He carries out research in bacterial genetics and is an expert on analyzing genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples, also known as functional metagenomics.
Associate Dean of Science, Student Relations and Professor and Undergraduate Advisor (Department of Biology)
Dr. Moffatt is intrigued by how gene expression and enzyme activities are regulated to meet the metabolic needs of plant growth and development. Her research involves genetics, metabolite profiling, enzyme assays, morphological analyses, and reporter gene studies, as well as immunodetection of protein levels and protein-protein interaction assays.
Assistant Professor (Department of Chemical Engineering)
Dr. Ward’s expertise is in metabolic engineering, recombinant protein production, and bioprocessing. However, she has worked with a number of different organisms including bacteria (E. coli, S. aureus, C. difficile, S. enterica), yeast (S. cerevisiae, R. diobovatum, Y. lipolytica), microalgae (C. vulgaris, C. reinhardtii, H. pluvialis, P. tricornium), as well as a number of types of cell culture including plant (T. brevifolia), human, and insect cells. This breadth of experience has been an excellent resource for Waterloo iGEM.
Interim Chair & Professor (Department of Chemical Engineering)
Dr. Aucoin specializes in Biochemical Engineering, particularly in cell culture engineering for the production of complex biologics: from proteins (projects have included work on myristoylated proteins, antibodies and other immune-system related proteins), to DNA, to virus-like particles, viruses and viral vectors.
Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor (Department of Biology)
Dr. Doxey is a computational biologist with expertise in applied bioinformatics, comparative genomics and protein function. Dr. Doxey provides guidance to the iGEM team on aspects related to bioinformatics and computational biology.
Professor Emeritus (Computer Science Department)
Professor Burkowski is primarily interested in the mathematical models and computational algorithms that are related to structural bioinformatics. In particular, his research deals with the structural changes that a protein undergoes to perform actions such as ligand binding and allostery. These topics may be of importance for an iGEM project that deals with dynamic changes within a molecular structure. A more general expertise relates to computational algorithms and programming (typically Python).
PhD Candidate, Applied Mathematics
Nathan's background is in computational and mathematical modeling of gene expression. His current research in Dr. Brian Ingalls’ lab focuses on optimal experimental design for models of synthetic regulatory networks that incorporate effects of host physiology.