Editors' Column University Instrument Centers The concept of the university instrumentation laboratory has been around for quite a while—a center making instrumentation and analytical services available to students and faculty in the chemistry department, and to researchers from other departments as well. Archeologists, anthropologists, and geologists, for example, often need access to expensive instruments, such as mass spectrometers and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, which they could ill afford to purchase and maintain in their own laboratories. According to Tom Lyttle, who runs an instrumentation laboratory at Iowa State University, the National Science Foundation's regional instrumentation facility program caused renewed interest in the instrument center concept. The purpose of the NSF regional facilities program, which got started in 1979, is to make expensive researchgrade instruments available to researchers all over the country. "People saw the advantages of that," explains Lyttle, "and more and more programs are being initiated at the local level as a result." Ohio State University, for example, is planning to open a university-wide facility this September. According to Devon Meek, chairman of the chemistry department of Ohio State, Alan Marshall from the University of British Columbia has accepted the directorship of the new center, which will start up with a 300-MHz NMR and two mass spectrometers. Plans are to add an additional instrument of each type during the first year of operation. The instrumentation laboratory at Northwestern University, directed by Claude Lucchesi, has been around for 13 years now. "We have just about every technique represented here," says Lucchesi. These include separations techniques, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, ESCA, electrochemistry, and a number of the newest hyphenated techniques, such as GCIR. "I kind of kid the undergraduates," Lucchesi says, "and tell them we're an equal opportunity supermarket for measurements. Another university instrumentation laboratory that has been around for a while is Purdue University's, run by Jonathan Amy. The program director for chemical instrumentation at the National Science Foundation, Joseph Paukstelis, calls the Purdue lab "one
of the best in the country" and a model for many other laboratories that have been set up since or are presently in the planning stages. The First Annual Conference of the University Lab Manager's Association, to be held Oct. 23-24, 1980, on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, 111., will focus on the problems and philosophy of setting up and operating one of these university laboratories. The conference, which was organized and conceived by Claude Lucchesi and Tom Lyttle, is primarily oriented toward the university instrumentation center, as opposed to the NSF instrumentation centers, which serve an entire region. "Each group is slightly different in the way it's evolved," Lyttle explains. His instrumentation laboratory at Iowa State provides analytical services, with very little in the way of research. At the other end of the spec-
trum (no pun intended) is Jon Amy's group at Purdue, where a full-scale research effort augments the service function. At the meeting, a number of these varied concepts will be discussed. Lucchesi will speak on Northwestern's experience, Lyttle will describe the Iowa State lab, and presentations will be made on the instrumentation centers at Yale and Purdue. State and federal funding will be discussed, and there will be a speaker from industry (where the analytical services laboratory has been a mainstay for many years). There will also be panel discussions and a visit to Northwestern's analytical services lab. For further information and registration forms for the conference, contact Tom Lyttle, Department of Chemistry, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, 515-294-5958. Stuart A. Borman
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ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 52, NO. 9, AUGUST 1980 ·
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