It is ever more difficult to argue that motivating knowledge workers is not the Holy Grail for 21st century lab managers. “Leadership,” according to management consultants, “is the process of motivating people to work together to accomplish great things."

Professional development goals that add value to your employees’ career ambitions AND your organization.

How to stop arguing and start communicating in the lab!

I wrote here several months ago that managers have the power to dramatically improve a lab’s bottom line by embracing new ways of doing things. I told the story of how one of the biggest game changers in the industry— the automation of manual processes— came about because suppliers chose to look at the customer/lab relationship in a new way.

In many applications, contamination of the gas stream must be prevented. When processing gases or sampling elements within a controlled environment, conveying the gas desirably cannot add trace elements such as lubricants or wear particles.

Emerging techniques for assessing physical properties of pharmaceuticals, personal care products, medical devices and packaging.

Lab automation projects have become cooperative activities between lab and IT groups. This is part of the evolution of lab systems.

In June 2011, Lab Manager, along with ChemSW Inc. and 3E Company, hosted a “Product Showcase” webinar on “How to Seamlessly Integrate MSDSs with Chemical Inventory Management.”

The latest equipment, instruments and system introductions to the laboratory market.

From protein sample preparation to next-generation sequencing to cell biology or the now more traditional HTS assays, many scientists are trying to eliminate the numerous manual steps that add cost and introduce variability to laboratory procedures.

Microplate-based multiplex assays, where microspheres are used as solid support matrices, provide simultaneous analyte analysis per well with lower background noise and reagent, consumable and sample costs compared to traditional ELISAs. Specifi

The motivation to maximize laboratory automation is as powerful as it is simple—laboratories must produce more high quality data—faster and cheaper. Today, most envision high throughput (HTP) automation as a robotically-driven integration

The primary goal of any laboratory is to collect and analyze data, and it is rare for many samples to be ready for analysis the moment they enter the lab. Samples may need cleanup or purification prior to downstream analysis.

In recent years, new research insights and breakthroughs have created demand for studies based on larger numbers of human samples. Facilities including hospitals, private research facilities, and huge government-owned biobanks, biorepositories of pat

In both industrial and academic labs, researchers are actively increasing the number of automated applications and tasks in order to improve performance and productivity while reducing costs and streamlining research. These changes include automating

As a result of automation in the pharmaceutical industry, large compound libraries for future analysis and screening for potential drug candidates are routinely created. Alongside an increase in chemical compound samples, the number of biological sam

Careful planning and consistent monitoring can significantly improve equipment maintenance programs.

Activity-based management (ABM) is an approach to management in which work process managers—in this case, lab managers at all levels—are given the responsibility and authority to continuously improve the planning and control of operations.

An overview of the most common hazards encountered in typical research labs

Given the current economic climate, most employers are probably looking to save on operations and improve their bottom lines. Usually they begin by trying to increase efficiency, or “trim the fat,” as the saying goes. And those of us who work in the area of health and safety know that we are usually prime targets.

CEM has developed a method for the simultaneous and rapid preparation of vastly different food sample types for trace metal analysis.

The cleaning of cosmetic creams and lotions from glassware is achieved through a combination of detergents, hot water – programmed in automated washing system.

Microwave Assisted Extraction offers significant benefits over traditional extraction techniques for PCB determination from environmental samples including higher sample throughput, time savings, reduced solvent, and great reproducibility.

Microvolume assessment of bacterial culture growth was found to facilitate measurement of undiluted cultures. Comparison between microvolume and cuvette-based data requires the use of a conversion factor, which can be simply determined.

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a powerful analytical technique used to separate, identify and quantify compounds with a wide range of differing properties.

Various types of synthetic colorants are used as food additives, and gradient elution is generally used to analyze them. The Nexera UHPLC (Shimadzu) enables stable, ultrafast gradient elution through accurate solution delivery and the use of a high--efficiency gradient mixer.