UMass Amherst iGEM Team Wins Silver Medal at iGEM Competition in Paris
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The newly established UMass Amherst iGEM student team, comprised of 16 undergraduate students from throughout UMass Amherst and the Riccio College of Engineering, was awarded a silver medal at the 2025 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Grand Jamboree Competition. This global competition took place in Paris from October 28 to 31 at the Paris Convention Centre, with more than 4,600 participants and 400 student teams from around the world competing. For the competition, each student team takes on the mission of designing, constructing, and testing a novel biological system that mitigates a pressing global issue.
This is the first time UMass Amherst has competed in the iGEM competition, and our iGEM team created a project called “CadmiCatch” to engineer a soil bacterium to selectively capture cadmium and address heavy-metal pollution, protect crops, and improve food safety.
The five student leaders on our iGEM team were Ashlyn Venoo (President, Finance and Human Practices), Tiffany Tan (Wet Lab), Dana Moochnick (Dry Lab), Ayush Nadiger (Wiki and Finance), and Jayce Lanzafame (Secretary).
After the event, Dana Moochnick reflected on her experience in Paris: "The iGEM Convention brought together people from every background, and it was so mesmerizing to see so much expertise in one place. I spoke with SynBio founder John Cumbers, learned from Dr. Adam Ritchie at Oxford, who helped biomanufacture billions of COVID-19 vaccine doses, and met teams from all around the world. My favorite panel featured leaders from NVIDIA and DeepLife discussing how AI will shape the next decade of biology. I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity, and I’m so proud that our team built up from scratch and made it all this way to Paris representing UMass Amherst, sharing our research with experts and scientists from all over the world, and even won a medal in our first year competing!"
The 16 students on the UMass iGEM team come from eight departments – Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Mathematics and Statistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Microbiology, and Biology – as well as from the Isenberg School of Management, Commonwealth Honors College, and Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration.
The team received funding from the CBE, Riccio College of Engineering, College of Natural Sciences, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, Commonwealth Honors College, and various donors and alumni.
As the UMass iGEM team explains its prize-winning project, “Cadmium pollution poses a major environmental and health hazard due to its mobility, bioaccumulation, and toxicity in soil ecosystems. The CadmiCatch project addresses this challenge by engineering [the soil bacterium] Pseudomonas putida to display the OprF-CadC fusion protein, enabling targeted sequestration of Cd²⁺ [or cadmium] ions directly at the bacterial surface.”
According to the team, “Future work will investigate how soil chemistry, including pH, organic matter, calcium concentration, and mineral phases, affects cadmium speciation and microbial-sequestration efficiency. In particular, acidic soils not only enhance cadmium solubility and toxicity but also compromise bacterial metal-binding defenses, underscoring the need for controlled studies across variable soil environments to optimize performance.” The team is also pursuing the addition of other features to ensure safe usage of the technology.
The UMass iGEM team’s faculty advisor and research supervisor for the competition was Associate Professor Lauren Andrews from the CBE Department. Associate Professor Matthew Moore from the Food Science Department advised the team and helped establish the UMass iGEM team along with Professor Andrews and student co-founders Ashlyn Venoo and Stanley Yuan.
The goal of the Grand Jamboree is to bring together researchers, industry representatives, startup founders, investors, journalists, experts in governance and policy, and the wider public to shape the future of synthetic biology, while the iGEM competition describes itself as “a transformative experience for aspiring biologists and synthetic-biology enthusiasts. Unlike traditional science fairs, iGEM challenges students to harness the potential of genetic engineering to address real-world problems.” The competition originated in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has since blossomed into a worldwide phenomenon. (December 2025)