Latest Reports

Institutions that allow research strategy to drive their infrastructure will forge productive relationships with their primary investigators (PIs) from the start and yield better research results. The University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, Canada, has successfully instituted procedures to take into account the financial and facility impact of potential research hires, which has positively impacted recruitment efforts and strengthened its research program.

Regents Hall Science Center, the first phase of Georgetown University’s Science Facilities Master Plan, integrates all physics, chemistry, and biology research labs on three connected floors. The new facility also houses the Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology, funded in part through a $6.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology. The institute conducts research into materials that are neither liquids nor solids, such as liquid crystals, gels, colloids, polymers, and foams.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) will be collecting comments through Sept. 10 on its new standard, Testing and Performance-Verification Methodologies for Ventilation Systems for Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Animal Biosafety Level 3 (ABSL-3) Facilities, also known as ANSI Standard Z9.14-2013. The 127-page document provides guidance for the inspection and testing of ventilation system components of new or existing BSL-3 and ABSL-3 laboratories, including research, pharmaceutical, and insectary facilities.

The 33,000-sf Clara Christie Centre for Mouse Genomics (CCCMG) at the University of Calgary—a centralized facility for the production and breeding of transgenic mice—expands mouse housing, provides procedure spaces for researchers, enables mouse transgenics production, and creates new space to phenotype the transgenic models.

Annual revalidation of BSL-3 biocontainment facilities—which involves verifying that systems are operating to specifications—is important not only to maintain a safe working environment for scientific needs, but also to reduce utility and maintenance costs and protect the substantial financial investments such buildings represent. The time and expense of the revalidation process can be minimized with careful preplanning.