The Team
Here's the link to our Official Team Profile.
We are a skillful and persistent group of nine Finns. We started as a group of students who didn't really know each other, assuming that we are going to spend our summer studying synthetic biology with strange collegues. We ended up getting a bunch of new friends and (in addition to studying synthetic biology) we just might have spent one of the best summers of our lives.
Our group is interdisciplinary and comes from the University of Helsinki and Aalto University; the two big universities located in the capital of Finland, Helsinki. We have expertise in many different fields ranging from genetics to product development and from computer science to food technology. Throughout the project, we needed basically all of the special skills of each member to make our visions come true. The diverse set of skills made it possible to have a broad view on any problem.
There were also moments when we noticed that no one in our team fits a specific task perfectly but we always took it as a possibility to learn something new (and there was always someone up for a challenge)! While everyone mostly got to do things they enjoyed the most and were good at already, all of us learned a lot during this project. About all kinds of things.
So, even while the team was divided to different subgroups who would focus on a certain part of the project, everyone got the chance to experience and learn something that they had never done before. Being a part of this team has been an amazing opportunity. It's difficult to imagine life without being in this team: how is it possible that we didn't even know each other a year ago?
![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2014/7/73/Aalto_Helsinki_Team.jpg)
From left to right: Niklas Itänen, Laura Laakso, Lassi Vapaakallio, Otto Lamminpää, Oskari Vinko, Martina Ikonen, Mikko Laine, Minttu Salmela, Pietu Roisko.