Team:SCUT/HP/Magazine/iGEM People

The Story of Our Team Leader

1.fight for IGEM

SCUT students won two gold medals and one silver in the Asia division’, seven students from ’SCUT-BGI genome innovative science institute’participate in ‘BGIC_ATCG’ and ‘ BGIC_0101’。And both of them perform outstandingly and won the gold medal in Asia division while these two teams both make the iGEM finals which was hold in MIT in 1st November 2013. What’s more, SCUT won silver medal via their first participation which is a breakthrough in the college. In the team, a handsome young boy worked day after day and persisted in the scientific road. Who is he?——2014 iGEM-SCUT leader Zhang Junjie.

2.Bring iGEM to SCUT

Junjie studied in Heyuan Zijin High School before he took the national university entrance examination in 2009 and chose bioengineering as his major in South China University of Technology with an excellent performance. When he first entered the college, like many other students specializing in biology, he had a negative impression of the future of biology and started to the preparation for transferring to another major. But a conference changed his mind and he made up his mind to do something great in biology. That was the orientation week, the dean of the biology school，Wang Xiaoning introduced an innovative pattern to the bachelor students——‘SCUT-BGI’which studied bioinformatics. Effected by Professor Wang, he decided to work harder expecting to join in the class. Owing to his study in BGI, he had an intimate contact with iGEM, and finally he introduced this chagelling competition into SCUT.. In his sophomore year, he studied in the innovative class as his wish, and started his one year research in the BGI institute. Through this year’s study, he participate in many projects, including Method and Device for Detecting Microdeletion in Chromosome STS Area etc, applied four patents, one international patent and two paper still writing included. What’s more, he represented ShenZhen BGI and participate in 2012 iGEM .

Early in 2013, he returned to his Alma Mater and start to introduced iGEM to every students as well as recruit 2013 iGEM team member. After several week’s hard working, he established the first iGEM team. Last summer vacation, he and his team members worded in the lab, without holiday, lad, air conditioner, Internet, even worse the limitation of equipment and material. So, they had to borrow other students lab and at the last detection of the experiment he stayed up for two nights. Finally, the team achieve the satisfactory results and won the silver medal in iGEM Asia division in October. From then on , iGEM started to have a significant influence on SCUT.

3.The anecdotes

Actually, iGEMer’s life is full of fun, we will introduce two funny stories about our group leader Zhang Junjie. In the normal time, he is a generous and casual person. He often watches movies, plays the card games, and plays the badminton. He is easygoing and willing to help the juniors. And his nickname is ‘sis pili’.

Speaking of the origin of his nickname, it’s a dark history, but related to our design of experiment. First, ’junjie’ is the pinyin of his name but when you type in the computer ‘sis bacteria’ shows in the bar that’s why we all call it sis bacteria. But why changed it into ‘sis pili’, there are two versions. The first one is related to project which we designed to reform pili and after the permit of our professor Li Shuang and Junjie we start to call it sis pili. As the second, we kept it as a secret.

What’s more, junjie fell into love with one of our team member yaoyao.

This winter vacation, iGEMer returned to school very early, and started to design our project. Life seemed simple and boring, every member sat together discussing the projects and papers. Because we lack of the profound knowledge of biology and the limitation of English level, we took long to finish reading one paper.

During this time, we needed to report every three days and shared ideas with others or ask junjie for help. Among these people, yaoyao is the most hard-working one, after the project design and training of experiment technique, yaoyao cooperate very well with junjie all the time and that makes them good partners. Finally, in a May night, leader showed his love, and they start a stable relationship.

Nowadays, our team encounters a intensive situation, and this couple guide the team to achieve our goal. Wish the SCUT team could overcome all the difficulties and win the gold medal！