My name is Jacques Blignaut, and I am from Cape Town, South Africa.
Although I have been lurking on these forms for some time, I guess it’s time to introduce myself formally.
I have a background in computational chemistry and have spent most of my career so far in automation of some kind. I have worked in the industrial automation space programming large robotic arms for manufacturing applications and I currently work as an Applications Specialist on Hamilton liquid handlers, for the Hamilton distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa (Separations).
Kudos to everyone on this form for being so generous with their knowledge and experience. Looking forward to learning more from all of you and hopefully making some contributions.
Hello Everyone, I’m Edward Latto - As of today (July 2025) just 3 months into my career in Lab Automation and Robotics over at Singer Instruments in the UK.
Loving the community so far, makes for a refreshing change to speak with people that are really passionate about their science.
Look forward to getting out in the community at events like SLAS and should be pretty responsive if anyone wants to chat!
I am Jonas and a Geneticist in a larger US-based laboratory. An abondened Gilson Pipetmax 268 which no-one in the lab can setup anymore brought me to this forum.
Hi everyone,
I am Peng, a scientist and a tinkerer deep in my heart.
My day job is product manager at Ritter GmbH, part of Avantor, for our J.T. Baker line of robotic tips and microplates. That’s partially what brought me to this forum and the other part is my interest in exchanging ideas on how to generally make lab automation a better experience.
Hope to learn from everyone and be able to make a positive contribution.
Hello everyone!
My name is Brian, based in Massachusetts, I work for a company called Cellarity. Currently working as a scientist, I also have been working with all the liquid handlers we have in our lab, happy to be a part of the community and looking forward to bouncing ideas and learning from yall.
Hello everyone!
My name is Hugo, and I am an operational systems specialist with approximately 8 years of experience in lab automation and robotics, including various liquid handlers, lab assets, and method integration and workflow improvement. I’ve worked with various NGS workflows and PCR-based chemistries, as well as miniaturized chemistries. I hope to build some wonderful connections and possibly seek out more amazing opportunities to grow in the future.
I’m Leon, and I just recently discovered and instantly fell in love with this forum. So many relevant and helpful posts from a supportive crowd here! I have been working in the german biotech industry specifically in the context of lab automation for roughly 4 years. In the flexibility of R&D environments, I had the opportunity to dive deep into the complete lifecycle of Tecan EVO and Fluent applications and integrations, currently working almost full-time with Hamilton STARs. I’m passionately seeking the best solutions and experience for the users of my applications, so I’m excited to join the community to learn and share knowledge!
I’m a lab manager, currently working at an academic institution to support a wide variety of labs. Many use some automation, usually for molecular biology processes, but there arent many resources dedicated to it or specific automation engineers. Its good to have a resource to direct folks to, and to get opinions about brands or models for purchases.
I’m currently looking for companies (bay area) in the automation field who might be interested in coming onsite to provide an informational session to scientists. It can definitely be part sales pitch, but want it to be something that has inherent value to a lab thinking about automating a process or looking for their next purchase. Ideally, they also bring treats!
Hi everyone! I’m Zack, a Preclinical Scientist at The Jackson Laboratory in Gainesville, FL. Over the past year I’ve been bringing a Fluent 780 (plasma sample dilution) and Fluent 1080 (ELISA) online. My background is in in vivo pharmacology, but I’ve developed a strong interest in automation and want to keep growing in this area.
Hi everyone! I am Andrea and I am a europe-based scientist. I work daily with lab automation and specifically with Hamilton hardware.
I found this forum by chance but it’s a wonderful collection of super useful information! Glad to be part of this!
I’m David (dibidave). I’m doing a start-up, ImYoo, where we’re building a (physically) decentralized blood biobank, banking small volumes of capillary blood people collect on their own from home (that they ship to our lab).
My background is in software engineering and data analysis, but I pivoted to doing molecular biology work in grad school. Startup came out of work from there with my labmates.
I recently came upon a used Hamilton STARlet and am excited at the prospect of setting up some of our workflows on it. Not so much to save time, but rather to maintain consistent processing (and spare some of our joints from repetitive strain injuries). We don’t have an automation budget so we have to bootstrap it
More broadly, I’m excited at the prospect of there being little ImYoo-esque biobanks all over the world, powered by small teams and robots. It’d be cool if we could have a parallel way of getting massive datasets on the immune system, completely separate from the current clinical infrastructure. That’s the only way I see of obtaining the kind of scale necessary for building longitudinal predictive models of human health. And doing it in a way that retains decision-making with us, the consumers, instead of mandates being delivered down to us from our healthcare providers.
Anywho, rambling aside, excited to meet other folks working on automating this human machine of lab science. Let’s create and explore; let machines handle the tedious!
I’m Joe, based in the Greater Boston area. I’m a robot wrangler with Hamilton STAR, Agilent Bravo, and Beckman Coulter Biomek experience. I started as a med tech/research associate, and shifted to lab automation during covid. My focus is developing end-to-end NGS library prep applications that minimize touchpoints and sample to sample variance.
