UppSense

What is UppSense like? Our team, like Uppsala University itself, is definitely diverse. We’re fifteen students from a variety of cultural and academic backgrounds. It’s in our differences where we’ve found our strength—there’s always someone to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. When we started, we had a wide range of reasons to join this competition. For some of us, it was about the learning experience. The idea of submerging into completely unrelated fields of knowledge was exciting and promising. For others, the appeal of the competition was in creating something from scratch, at the side of fellow students. But there was one motivation we all shared from the very beginning: the opportunity to improve others’ quality of life.

The more we research about valproate and explore different ideas for our biosensor, the more we learn about epilepsy as well. SensUs 2020 has become an opportunity not to only get to know brilliant students to share a goal with for a year, but also grow as people. Learning about new perspectives, realities and struggles we’re fortunate not to experience ourselves is enriching our worldview—and we look forward to more of it.

About supervisors

Gemma Mestres has been coach of the Uppsala University team from the first edition in 2015-2016. She belongs to the Microsystems Technology Division of the Technological and Natural Sciences faculty, her background is on the development and biological characterization of biomaterials for tissue regeneration.

Masood Kamali-Moghaddam received his PhD in Pharmaceutical Microbiology at Dept. of Pharmaceutical Biosciences at Uppsala University where he studied bacterial genetics and the importance of transposition and site-specific recombination in dissemination of antibiotic resistance. Currently, he works as Associate Professor in Molecular Diagnostics at same department and continues working on development of highly sensitive molecular tools for search for protein and exosome biomarkers and early diagnostics.