Hi everyone I’m Daniel Yip. I work for Synthace as a Scientist and Lab Automation Consultant. I’m a trained scientist with a MSc Molecular Medicine from Imperial and hold a status of Chartered Scientist (CSi) and Member with the Royal Society of Biology (MRSB)
I have a hybrid role where I run our scientific experiments on our robots in the lab pushing out the capabilities of Synthace. The other side of my role is consultative where I engage with people and discuss around lab automation / digitalisation / innovation.
Protein purification and downstream bioprocessing: Tecan Te-Chrom system and Repligen Robocolumns
I’m so excited to see so many like minded people here. My main mission is to:
Help and inspire the life sciences industry to adopt technology and lab automation.
Supporting biotechs, CDMOs and top pharmaceuticals in developing lab automation strategies
Delivering a solution to scientists to innovate faster and speed up insight sharing to unlock the true potential of biology
(Cheeky self promote)
I post a lot on LinkedIn showcasing our lab and moving robots to help inspire more people to think about lab automation and digitalisation so do drop by and see our Synthace lab https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-yip/
I’m Eric Sindelar, the Director of Applications at Hamilton. I’ve been with Hamilton for almost 17 years and have previous laboratory automation experience in a cGMP lab. In my current role, I manage a team of over 70 applications specialists in North America who implment automated liquid handling solutions for the Life Sciences community.
I started as a field applications specialist at Hamilton in the SF Bay Area and do miss the days when I was more hands-on with the equipment. I am happy to help provide support when I can and also provide feedback to our product management team so we can continue to improve our products.
Hello everyone, my name is Lauren Goeser, and I am a Laboratory Automation Scientist at Nurix Therapeutics in San Francisco. While this is my first position that focuses specifically on laboratory automation, I’ve been working with Hamilton liquid handlers for about 5 years and continue to do so at Nurix with a recently installed Vantage system. I am part of a compound management group that is hoping to streamline its workflows and eventually progress to assay ready plates (or as close as we can get). I have also recently started programming an Opentrons system as well and am really enjoying it!
A big thank you to the people who set up this forum, I have high hopes for its success! I’ve been hoping for something like this for the past 5 years, and I’m looking forward to some interesting discussions!
Hey all, my name is Albert and I am an Automation Engineer at Octant Bio in Emeryville, CA.
Previously, I’ve been at Transcriptic (Now Strateos) from 2016 to 2018 and then was hired as the first automation engineer (besides the Head of Automation) at insitro from 2018 to 2022. Recently just joined Octant Bio!
Looking forward to a more open source type community.
Hi @DanLord - great idea to have an introduction thread!
My name is Trish Sargentini (nee Resplandor). I’m a Staff Automation Engineer for Illumina. I’ll be focusing on super-charging automation within Illumina Lab Services and it various projects.
Before becoming an automation engineer, I was a field service engineer for Labcyte (now Beckman-Coulter) and Biosero working on acoustic liquid handlers… and before my FSE days, I considered the Clinical Laboratory Scientist (CLS) route during my time within the diagnostic lab world.
It is wonderful to see in this thread alone so many familiar companies that I’ve gotten the opportunity to directly interact with as an FSE. This space has so much potential - looking forward to the future of automation for us all!
I’m Kobi! I’m studying for a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. I don’t work on lab automation actively, but I have helped program small robots in the chemistry and formulations space previously. My focus right now is on using machine learning to help speed up process development (see Summit), which I think could be helpful in biotech!
Hi everyone, I’m Gareth Price, a senior scientist II at Oxford Biomedia, a cell and gene therapy company. I work in the computer-aided biology group, which focuses on automation, digitilisation and high-content biology in both research and GxP settings.
My formal qualifications are in biochemistry, biology, and mathematical biology, however I have been programming for nearly 20 years, originally as a web developer and subsequently languages such as C, Obj-C, Swift, and a bit of golang/rust.
I am very much looking forward to contributing here, what a great idea!
I have a background in Biotechnology and a PhD in Life Sciences. I started using automation during my PhD, optimizing a huge Biomek for automated RNAi screens, that was 11 year ago and it was fun!
Nowadays I co-lead the Pharmb.io group at Uppsala University. We are interested in morphological profiling of cells for drug discovery, safety assessment, environmental toxicology, disease modelling…We have built our own robotic system, with a UR10e as a central part, and we have also developed our own open source scheduling software. So we run our experiments semi-autonomously.
Happy to help where I can and really happy to see this forum taking off!
I’m John Larson - I’m an NGS sales rep for IDT. I’ve got almost no hands on experience with automation, but after spending some time meeting with customers and learning about their challenges with it, I’m hoping to learn a bit more and potentially make a shift into the space. Looking forward to learning as much as I can about the current issues and forward trends in both hardware and software! If anyone is in Cambridge/Boston or Pittsburgh and wants to meet up, I’m open any time.
This is great - thanks @Stefan for setting up the forum.
I am Russell Green, director of product growth at Automata. I am pretty passionate about driving greater adoption of automation in our industry and am currently focussed on developing around applications where people can get a toe hold.
I’ve been in automation for a good few years. Mostly at Beckman in a binch of roles - sales, apps, marketing, product but largely leading the team working on the trickiest problems and larger systems. I leapt out of the big company world and into product role at Synthace (hi @DanielYip !) working on a super interesting software platform.
Looking forward to some good chats about automation on here.
Russ
Hi All, I just found this site the other day and am loving it so far.
I am Brad Meyer, I am currently leading the automation development at Aromyx in Mountain View, CA. Prior to joining Aromyx, I was a Sr Automation Engineer at both Lyell Immunopharma and Personalis. My official training came from a a few great years as Field Apps with Hamilton in the Bay Area, so special shout-out to all my Hamilton peeps here. Prior to all this I spent 9 years on the bench at Seagen where I worked creating both therapeutic and reagent mAbs for therapeutic antibody-drug conjugate programs.
The vast majority of my experience is in Hamilton robots, STARs and VANTAGES (VoV and IV). I love spending time continuing to explore the ins-and-outs of VENUS and how to bend it to my needs while still making it maintainable. All that said, I love filling in my knowledge-gaps in the lab automation space, because I have many.
Currently, I am working on learning more about the data aspect of lab automation, tying the Hamiltons in directly to AWS databases and integrating these new generation software tools (like SLACK, Benchling, Artificial, etc.) so that the robots become more powerful and yet actually easier to use and maintain. I am also leaning heavily into programming for deployments at scale, so there is a focus on custom libraries, lookups, and references (basically trying to remove any robot-specific personalization from the methods.)
I NERD out about lab automation and get unreasonably excited when talking about equipment. The SLAS convention hall floor is my happy place.
Hey, I’m Sandor Albert. Background in Biotechnology. Currently employed at Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Aachen, Germany, since ~1,5 years. I specialize in bioprocess engineering & lab automation and so far I have experience with bigger liquid handlers such as Tecan EVO200, PerkinElmer JANUS and Hamilton VANTAGE. Previously I did my M.Sc. at Jülich Research Centre along with geniuses who somehow got to hack these sometimes mysterious liquid handlers. I love programming and have a bit of experience in Python and OOP (I programmed a script to generate and optimize large work lists as part of DoEs revolving around liquids as factors).
Also, at Fraunhofer IME we have a HTS platform based on plant suspension cells. If there is interest, feel free to reach out: https://www.ime.fraunhofer.de/en/Research_Divisions/business_fields_MB/bioprocess_engineering.html
I am very happy and thankful to @Stefan for giving us this opportunity. Been hoping for a such platform since my time working here.
Hi All! I’m Kiera! Fairly new to Automaton ~2years with Hamilton Vantages Currently work in Immunology trying to grow our company’s automation program.
I’m so happy to have found this forum! It’s really helping fill the gap of automation resources. Thank you for creating this! I’m very much looking forward to learning as much as I can from very experienced automation scientists and engineers!
Hello Everyone,
I am the Midwest Account Manager for Biosero, but have been a long-time user of automation in the clinical diagnostic space. I have spent time as a Technical Specialist at Mayo Clinic where I worked with Hamilton liquid handlers and Mass Spectrometry instrumentation. Following that, I spent 5 years working for Hamilton in a Feild Applications role. I spent some time after Hamilton working in product/business development, specifically working with Tecan liquid handlers. In December of this year, I joined the Biosero FAS team designing and implementing device agnostic integrated workcells. I made the transition to sales in July. I really enjoy enabling customers to automate their workflows.
Hey everyone! You can call me Jo. I began my career a little over a decade ago as a technologist at LabCorp (CMBP) where I got very familiar with their fleet of EVOs and eventually began training new hires on usage and maintenance. Worked for a few other small genetics/genomics labs, then did a few years in field automation for Tecan…now I am lead automation engineer for a small-ish medical lab in SC with a fleet of ~20 Hamilton STARs and 10 Vantages (running VoV).
I love the hardware troubleshooting side of what I do, but I have a real affinity for applications – specifically, learning what amazing things are happening on Hamilton and Tecan instruments elsewhere around the globe. Looking forward to learning from you all!
youve come to the right place then! I encourage you to make a thread about one of your strong automation opinions
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