A greeting from ExFAB Director and Principal Investigator, Dr. Michelle A. O'Malley
The past few months have been a period of enormous progress for the NSF ExFAB BioFoundry. We were thrilled to welcome our newly formed External Advisory Board, which held its inaugural meeting in May. Their expertise and guidance will be invaluable as we move forward. Spring also saw the launch of our marquee educational and training programs. The CSU Master’s Scholars program embeds CSU Master's students in ExFAB-affiliated laboratories at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside for an in-depth, 10-week summer internship to learn the cutting-edge techniques essential for the future of biotechnology. We also welcome our first cohort for the ExFAB Summer School, an intensive one-week program held in August at UC Santa Barbara to familiarize researchers with ExFAB facilities with a focus on automation in biology. Our education team and lab managers are hard at work planning hands-on training modules that leverage ExFAB’s unique facilities.
We look forward to this Summer with great excitement. In addition to hosting our scholars and summer school, after over a year of intensive planning, ExFAB’s first-of-its-kind anaerobic chamber has been custom-fabricated and is being installed right now. The chamber features 13 different instruments to support the full spectrum of microbial research, leveraging robotics and automation to move samples between instruments without ever leaving their environmentally controlled environment. The equipment in the chamber can be used as an integrated system or stand-alone, providing maximum flexibility. ExFAB’s facilities both at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside will be fully operational by this September, and we look forward to enabling new research directions from academic and industry researchers across the nation. Our deep thanks to MBRAUN and Thermo Fisher for their help in making this one-of-a-kind equipment a reality.
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