Help with Lab Automation Presentation

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Hi everyone! I got invited to give a talk about Lab Automation for the intro to Biomedical Engineering class at my alma mater. Originally it was going to be a quick 10 minute talk, but now that’s been extended to a full lecture, which makes me a little nervous!

This is super exciting to me, as I never got any exposure to lab automation or scalable science while I was doing my degree.

Some basic questions I think freshman undergrads might want answered in the talk are:

  1. What is lab automation?
  2. How do lab automation engineers work with scientists in different fields?
  3. What are the leading/emerging fields and technologies?
  4. Someone is definitly going to ask about AI.
  5. What are some valuable skills for graduate looking to get into the field?
  6. Job market size and prospects?

I was wondering if anyone in this group would be willing to send me sample slides or inspiration for slides on the lab automation landscape. I need to have slides ready by April 23rd. I would appreciate help or discussion of any kind!

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Hey Phil,

I may still have some slides available from my hackathon presentation.

Do you have an email?

Also I can share notes from my SLAS talk.

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Suggestions I’d have for topics are:

The main processes automation is used for like sequencing prep, cloning, cell culture.

The fields where it is used such as drug screening and enzyme engineering.

Equipment types like thermal cyclers, centrifuges, plate readers, incubators. The types of processes each of these can be used for.

Differences in scale between labs such as some labs having only one robot to do basic workflows and some labs having 20 liquid handlers with robot arms, extensive sample tracking etc.

Python interfaces of course (students can try out PyLabRobot for free)

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I will DM you, thanks Luis!

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A demo is a great idea to get people engaged! Do you know of any protocol building software that is quick to install and has a good simulator? My first thought is just to use the Opentrons online protocol builder as a demonstration.

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Yes - PyLabRobot is an open-source universal interface to liquid-handling robots that ships with a browser based simulator. All you need is Python and a browser and you can run robot simulations.

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I partially work on Hamilton Venus for liquid handling, rest of work is on device; Illumina/ONT sequencer API; bio-pipeline; cloud integration.

the all in one end-to-end NGS workflow does: DNA extraction, tagmentation, library-prep, sequencer loading, API controled sequencer start, sequencing data upload, Bio-pipeline. Basically samples in, result and fastQ out.

we call it new kind of lab automation.

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Do you have any example slides or ideas I could implement for my presentation to these students?

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I wonder if you can partner with a liquid handler company to demo their instrument in the class to show off a simple protocol.

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