Core Facilities Workshop

Sunday 17th September 2017

Location: O’Brien Centre for Science, University College Dublin

Chairs: Garry Corthals and Irena Dapic

Organising Committee

Garry Corthals, Irena Dapic, Alina Astefanei (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Christoph Borchers (University of Victoria, BC, Canada)

Overview

Most universities and research institutes nowadays require a large number of core facilities and resources to support their life sciences research and innovation ecosystem. As proteomics continues to grow, so does the effective integration and running of these facilities. There are numerous application areas where such facilities are nestled, whether these be in hospitals or chemistry departments.
Maintaining in-need services, financial viability and promoting the facilities in an academic environment can be challenging for core facilities. This pre-conference workshop will review and discuss the many topics related to running and maintaining core facilities for proteomics
in these challenging financial times.

The draft programme for this workshop is detailed below and the programme will be updated mid-August.

Topics to be addressed

1. Overview of types of facilities
o Setting national and regional budgets
o QC, LIMS and project management systems, SOPs
o Identifying a community
o Links with other facilities (e.g. bioinformatics)

2. Setting-up and maintaining Infrastructure
o Sustainability models
o Funding of facility
o Pricing of services
o Collaboration vs. fee for service (co-authorship vs. $$$), etc.
o Client/collaborator relationship

3. Lab work
o Developing and maintaining SOPs
o Developing protocols with collaborators
o Payments, contracts, agreements
o Tracking core-contributed publications

4. Teaching
o Providing courses to stakeholders
o Training/education of technicians
o Outreach to community

5. Personnel
o Careers within facilities
o PhDs within facilities
o Guest researchers