Core Facilities and Service Laboratories
Infrastructure vital to discovery
Core facilities and service laboratories serve essential functions at South Dakota State University.
Our core facilities support faculty research by providing tools and equipment that can be utilized by multiple users. Meanwhile, the service laboratories offer assistance to the public.
These laboratories and facilities also work as learning centers for our students in both high-tech developments and research efforts.
SDSU’s infrastructure continues to evolve as we provide the means to better assist our faculty researchers and scientists, who continue to make groundbreaking breakthroughs in their disciplines.
The Mission of Research Core Facilities
The research core facilities seek to enable research by providing access to equipment and technologies too expensive for single labs to operate and the expertise to researchers needing it.
In the context of multidisciplinary and team-based science, research core facilities are essential to facilitate the use of technologies and approaches outside of the researchers’ expertise. Research core facilities have been defined as “a collaborator that will not say ‘no’ unless there are technical feasibilities concerns.”
Research core facilities offer potential benefits, such as:
- Increased utilization of the infrastructure and broader access to state-of-the-art services, facilities and technologies offered by centralizing its management and operation.
- The strategic development of proposals with a focus on the promotion of interdisciplinary collaborations, while avoiding duplication of infrastructure.
- A better utilization of resources through economies of scale and cost savings and reduced duplication of efforts.
- Enhanced training for students, staff and faculty, which leads to greater availability of technical expertise.
- Enhanced attraction and capacity to work with external users.
- An improved capacity to sustain the research infrastructure over its useful lifetime.
Research Core Facilities Development and Management
A research core facility has a faculty director/coordinator (approximately 20% dedication) leading the technical expertise and financial management of the facility resources. Depending on the mode of operation, each facility should have one or more technicians to train users, maintain equipment and process samples.
Some management recommendations include:
- To protect the facility directors from negative impacts in promotion and tenure processes, a specific annual review should be included in the faculty’s promotion/tenure dossier.
- Develop clear best financial practices for facility directors to follow and consider unifying invoicing practices under a common management software.
- Consider acquiring/subscribing to a common facility management software for equipment reservations, monitoring and invoicing.
- To ensure proper recognition, we should develop acknowledgment and authorship guidelines for facility personnel.
- To better capture facilities impact and improve success in future equipment funding opportunities, a manuscript and grant proposal reporting system should be developed with corresponding policy clearly explained to faculty and researchers.
A Five-Year Development Plan for Research Core Facilities
This is a five-year development plan with the overall goals of:
- Improving awareness and trust in the research core facilities among campus stakeholders.
- Having an established mechanism of support for research core facilities.
- Integrating research core facilities in the educational, training and outreach offerings of the university.
Year one goals:
- Have one to two research core facilities with a higher user base.
Year two goals:
- Have one to two facilities with higher use.
- Update webpages regularly to highlight research applications made possible by each research core facility.
- Make regular presentations/seminars to colleges and departments.
- Have established one to two additional high-priority research core facilities.
- One of these facilities will be a material characterization research core facility.
- Develop a feedback mechanism to gather information on potential new research core facilities and new instrumentation/applications.
- Have established a plan for support and continuity of research core facilities.
- Develop a budget plan to present to associate deans for research, deans, provost and president.
- Have started integration of research core facilities in internal education and training.
- Develop one training workshop per research core facility.
- Work with Graduate School on a pathway to validate those workshops as credits.
Year five goals:
- Have established three additional high-priority research core facilities.
- Have all research core facilities at higher use.
- Have the research core facilities integrated in internal and external educational, training and outreach opportunities.
How to Request Services for the Genomics Sequencing and Functional Genomics Core Facilities
We are using Stratocore PPMS to manage the Genomics Sequencing Facility and Functional Genomics Core Facility. Go to PPMS.
You will need to request an account the first time you log in. SDSU users will use their SDSU single sign-on after we generate your account.
