All forums that I’ve joined in the past have had an ongoing thread where new members can introduce themselves and say hi to the community, so I’ll go first.
I’m Dan Lord, I’m at the Danish liquid handling company Flow Robotics where I manage the Northern European business. We are here to make automation, especially liquid handling, more accessible to scientists - through simple software and smart design.
Previous automation & LH experience at Formulatrix, Thermo and VWR. In sales, product management, applications, training and marketing
In my lab life I was (am still at heart) a microbiologist and lover of lab automation - first robot project was for automated ELISA testing in 1998 at Pedigree Masterfoods in the heart of the Midlands UK.
Also a hardcore social media lover and you can find me on Twitter @Photovoltage and LinkedIn LinkedIn
Can’t wait to hear more from the community on this forum and learn from everyone, thanks to the organisers for creating it!
Hey All
I work at the Technical University of Denmark as the laboratory automation expert for an agro biological research project known as SABS (Smarter Agro Biological Screening). We are using high throughput and machine learning to efficiently find new biological pesticides that are better for the environment.
I was originally trained in microbiology and synthetic biology but since 2016 i have focused on laboratory automation. Both with programming liquid handlers(Tecan, opentrons, flowbot) or by building small devices to help my colleagues alleviate bottlenecks in our workflows.
I love working with all aspects of lab automation and would love to give my two cents to any issues or listen in to others experiences.
Hi Everyone - I am Mark Budde, CEO of Primordium Labs. We developed an overnight, whole-plasmid and long-PCR sequencing platform and have had very high adoption in the US, with many of our customers completely switching to us instead of doing Sanger sequencing.
Longer term, we aim to be the main hub for synbio DNA/circuit design and we are going like crazy right now.
Our central aim on everything we do is speed and scalability. To that end, almost everything we do is automated, including tons of custom 3D printed modules for our robots. We are looking for people who are interested in creative solutions to lab automation, at all levels. Please email me, mark@primordiumlabs.com if you are looking to upgrade your career!
I’m Tony Fortunato, and I’m a Sr. Automation Engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks. Prior to coming here, I’ve worked on robotics and embedded systems at places like Amazon Robotics, iRobot, Rethink Robotics. I’ve also worked in automation in the semiconductor industry at places like Applied Materials.
Super excited to be part of the biotech / syn bio automation world, and to build new capabilities in the space. Nice to meet all of you!
Howdy! Nadim Morhell here, Director of Automation and Data Management at EnginZyme, a swedish biotech company bringing stable immobilized enzymes to the traditional world chemical manufacturing.
Physicist by training, I’ve been tinkering with lab instrumentation since my PhD days. At EnginZyme we are building internal tools to give our researchers super powers.
I believe small scale biotech labs can flourish by bringing in practices from the software industry and the makers community.
Looking forward to share tips and tricks and get inspired by your work
Hello everyone! My name is Sam Burns and I am a Senior RA at Genentech in South San Francisco. I started out as an analytical chemistry/instrumentation person (liquid chromatography, mass spec, etc.) but since 2016 have focused on developing liquid handlers + associated tools.
My group works on protein therapeutics and have an array of instruments with my focus being the developer for the Hamilton’s and Tecan’s. We also have some Opentrons, Beckman, Unchained labs and other robots. Happy to share my experience and connect with everyone on the forum!
I’m Rachael Cohen, Senior Manager of Lab Assays, Automation, and Operations at Prime Medicine. My team at Prime is responsible for developing and automating plate-based (ELISA, cell-based, and mix-and-read) methods for CMC. We’re DIYing it, with in-house integration, table building, arm mounting, scripting, and end-user interface development.
I’m a Philly transplant, where I spent 8 years in Merck’s vaccine high-throughout analytics group. The team there were often early adopters, beta testers, and self-declared bug-finders. We had Evos, Fluents (FluentControl v1.0 was not for the faint of heart), Vantages (yes, running InstinctV), Lynxes, and Felix, and worked with HRB and PAA for integrations.
I’m super excited to be apart of this community now and am more excited for the tools that are being built to help new and old automators!
Hey everyone, my name’s Derek, I’m an automation engineer at Tessera Tx in Somerville, MA. I’ve been working in lab automation for ~5 years, with a background in molecular biology. Very pysched something like this got up and off the ground.
Big thanks to @Stefan for getting this going, I really think this is going to blow up and be a game changer for engineers
Hello! My name is Kyle Campbell and I am a Technical Product Manager at Strateos, a cloud lab organization in the Bay Area. I’ve been with the organization and in the lab automation space for a year.
My background is in operations and product management for hospital-based clinical medical devices. As someone who has recently moved into this industry I’m excited to see this forum take shape and the enthusiasm for making this industry more accessible and open-source.
I believe this push to automate the life sciences will bring huge benefits to our society in the form of faster and better therapies, ultimately resulting in helping our neighbors (and ourselves) live healthier lives.
My Name is Kyle and I’m CEO & CTO at GeNovu. Been into lab automation since my first job after college in 2008. Looking forward to learning more about current industry trends and new technologies.
Hey all,
My name is Christopher Rucker I work for Myriad Genetics and I support the Tech & R&D teams in hiring. I’m curious to learn more about Lab Automation and make connections with anyone who’s interested!
Cheers!
Sam Stoney. I’ve held both sales and engineering roles in automation at Festo Corporation nearly forever; exclusively life science focused since about 2004. My original background is mechanical design, but I always seem to end up trying to solve fluidic problems.
One of my key roles at Festo is to try to find ways to help incubators and startups solve lab automation from concept through commercialization. There are a lot of challenges to this, but I think working with a scalable, open source software architecture may be a really good start.
I work at Artificial. We make lab automation more accessible to scientists.
I have spent most of my career working for both small and large Automation Integrators and instrument providers and have helped automate many workflows. I am looking forward to contributing to this Forum!
Hi everyone, I am Mark Cerutti. I am currently an automation engineer at GRO Biosciences in Cambridge, MA. Right now I am working on putting the finishing touches on (while trying to actually use) our golden gate assembly cloning workflow. My background is in chemical engineering, and I have worked in lab liquid handler automation for about 3 years now.
Excited to start using and contributing to this forum!
Hi all, I’m James Bagley, a researcher with Concordia University’s Genome Foundry. My background is yeast genomics and metabolic engineering, and of course using lab automation to make that work faster and easier.
Hi, I’m Seth Goldman. I run a small core facility at Harvard Medical School focused on NextGen sequencing of nascent RNA. I’m a molecular biologist by training and am working to automate our protocols using the Agilent Bravo platform. It’s great to have found a place to discuss and learn more about automation.
Hi everyone,
My name is Duane Currier; I manage the automation and operations of the high throughput screening center at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. We do small molecule screens for internal collaborators in the basic science and clinical research labs. I have been here for about 8 years, making the robots go and keeping our screening programs moving along.
I’m looking forward to some insightful discussions.
@DCurrier I’d love to hear more about what setup you are using for drug screening, like what kind of robots you are using and protocols you are running!
@Stefan We are running two HighRes systems and a BioCel system that Agilent built for us before they stopped doing custom work cells. We just finished an upgrade to one of our HighRes systems to add more storage capacity and liquid handling. We use Echos to dose our plates, we add reagents or cells with either a multidrop combi or tempest, and our endpoints are read with a plate reader or high content imager, usually. We have both Envisions and PheraStars on our systems and our primary imager is a Yokogawa CV8000.
My name is Marlon Trotter. I am an automation technologist for the high throughput bioscience center at St. Jude Children’s Research hospital in Memphis, TN. As @DCurrier already mentioned, we are a collaborative lab that performs small molecule screens for internal collaborators. My primary role is creating automation protocols on our robots and keeping our devices operational to keep our projects moving forward.
I am approaching my 2nd year here at St. Jude. Prior to this role, I was a validation specialist and later an onsite instrumentation technician for Quest Diagnostics working primarily with liquid handlers and hematology analyzers.