Rice University’s Shared Equipment Authority (SEA) is reaching a milestone. The organization is celebrating its 25 years of existence with a Silver Anniversary Symposium from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. April 29 at the BioScience Research Collaborative with all users, stakeholders, vendors and the larger Rice research community invited to join.
With its team of 20 highly experienced technical staff, SEA provides access to approximately 150 cutting-edge instruments in 30,000 square feet of shared laboratory space spread across 12 facilities in eight different buildings, both for the campus and the surrounding research community. This includes nearly 900 internal users and almost 200 external users, including researchers from the Texas Medical Center as well as constituents from a multitude of other industries.
SEA is governed by an 18-member faculty board drawn from its stakeholder departments and chaired by James McNew, professor of biosciences. This structure’s effectiveness and efficiency in managing Rice’s shared equipment has been nationally recognized by the National Research Council. (National Research Council, “Midsize Facilities: The Infrastructure for Materials Research,” National Academies Press, 2006, pp. 53-56).
During the event, Vicki Colvin, dean of Louisiana State University’s College of Engineering and SEA founder, will serve as the keynote speaker, and Angelo Benedetto, retired SEA director of operations, will moderate a panel of four Houston-area SEA alumni who will speak about the organization’s impact on their careers.
Colvin has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds five patents and is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Sustainable Nanotechnology Award, the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award from Rice and associate editorship for the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
Colvin’s leadership roles include decadeslong directorship of the National Science Foundation Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology; vice provost for research at Rice; provost at Brown University; and most recently, founding director of Brown’s Institute for Biology, Engineering and Medicine.
Additionally, representatives from SEA’s vendor sponsors will be in attendance and presenting technology talks. As a bonus, SEA will host two poster sessions for graduate students featuring research projects that utilize Rice SEA resources.
To attend the free event, register at research.rice.edu/sea.