Research Facilities

Advanced instrumentation and spaces that support innovation.

The College of Science and Technology (CST) is home to the advanced Science Education and Research Center (SERC). One of the largest facilities of its kind on the East Coast, SERC is home to teaching and research labs, sophisticated instrumentation and collaborative spaces to facilitate innovation and discovery.

To increase its research potential, CST houses common instrumentation facilities for use by faculty and students at the college and across Temple University. Instrumentation includes three X-ray diffractometers, a transmission electron microscope, and an accurate-mass quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer, which provides superior sensitivity and data quality for profiling, identifying, characterizing and quantifying compounds.

The college’s Research and Instructional Support Facility offers machining, including a computer numerical-control milling machine, providing the ability to design and manufacture an array of tools, prototypes and products essential for advanced research. Owl’s Nest, a high-performance computing, hosts 6,464 CPU cores, providing about 57 million service units (CPU core hours) per year.

Science Education and Research Center

Opened 2014 and LEED Gold Registered, the Science Education and Research Center, is home to seven research centers, teaching and research labs and collaborative spaces to foster discover and innovation.

Low-vibration scanning tunneling microscope facility
Class 100 and Class 1000 clean rooms, where the concentration of airborne particles is controlled to specified limits
Variable air volume capabilities to control air pressure in each lab
Groundwater monitoring wells for student instruction and region-wide projects

Watch the SERC video

Analytical Instrumentation

CST hosts centralized instrumental to support faculty research efforts, including:

Bruker APEX II DUO X-ray Diffractometer
The Bruker APEX II DUO X-ray diffractometer is designed for structural determination of single crystals of small molecules (typically less than 500 non-hydrogen atoms). The diffractometer combines a molybdenum X-ray source for high throughput and charge density experiments, and a copper source for absolute configuration and protein screening. The APEX2 softwarehas a graphical user interface that guides the user through the complete experiment and analysis, from data acquisition through data collection, integration and scaling to structure solution and refinement and report generation.

Bruker D8 Discover
The Bruker D8 Discover X-ray diffractometer is optimized for determination of thin film structures. Common applications include grazing-incidence XRD(GIXD), X-Ray Reflectivity (XRR), X-ray rocking curve analysis, reciprocal space maps, texture (pole figure) and residual stress analysis. The D8 Discoverdiffractometer can also be reconfigured for small-angle X-ray scattering applications.

JEOL JEM-1400 Transmission Electron Microscope
The JEOL JEM-1400 is a 120kV class TEM equipped with STEM units and an EDS analyzer. It is suitable for biological, polymer and materials science applications. The TEM offers high resolution (0.2 nm) and high contrast imaging capabilities and the STEM/EDS offer point analysis (2.0 nm) and elemental mapping capabilities. The instrument comes with a standard sample holder for routine measurements at room temperature, a liquid nitrogen transfer holder for CRYO-TEM, and a heating holder that allows the direct observation of microstructural phase changes, nucleation, growth and dissolution processes.

Biological Safety Labs Level 3

Owl’s Nest HPC

Owl’s Nest is the latest Linux cluster for high-performance computing. It was procured and assembled in 2017. It features 180x new dual-socket compute nodes with 28 cores and 128GB of RAM each. Research with larger memory requirements will benefit from 6x 512GB, 6x 1.5TB and 2x 3TB RAM machines. In addition, each 512GB box also hosts two NVIDIA P100 GPUs. An EDR InfiniBand (100Gb/s) fabric is used as interconnect.

In November 2018 the cluster was further extended with 48 more dual-socket compute nodes with 16 cores and 96GB of RAM each. In total, Owl’s Nest currently hosts 6,464 CPU cores, providing about 57 million service units (CPU core hours) per year. All of this is backed by a new 1.5PB parallel storage which hosts all user data and is shared across the entire cluster. For large public (read-only) data sets, there is an additional 0.5PB storage. Learn more

Research and Instructional Support

The Research and Instructional Support Facility (RISF) provides machining, technical design and consulting services to the College of Science and Technology and Temple University researchers. A student machine shop located adjacent to the main facility allows students to use basic shop tools to support their work after taking a required shop introduction and safety program. Learn more.

Zebrafish facility

Established in 2008 in the Bio Life Building, the 1,200 square-foot space contains 8 double-sided six-shelf zebrafish housing units. For flexibility of use, standard Aquaneering racks were widened and equipped with double gutters, allowing us to mix and match tanks freely on both sides of each unit.

Water is supplied by an in-house reverse osmosis unit and circulated through particle filters, biological filter and UV sterilizer. Water salinity and pH are automatically maintained, while water pressure and temperature are constantly monitored. A quarantine room houses a single five-shelf housing rack and holds fish imported from outside Temple University.

In their natural habitat zebrafish spawn twice a year when the day/night cycle reaches 14 hours /10 hours. We therefore maintain a 14 hour light/10 hour dark lighting cycle. Many fish are set up for mating daily. Fish strains which fail to produce embryos by natural mating are propagated by in vitro fertilization. Fish embryos are raised to adulthood in the facility to establish breeding stocks and produce new transgenic lines.

Currently the facility houses zebrafish which belong to the laboratories of Dr. Darius Balciunas, Dr. Gianfranco Bellipanni, Dr. Raymond Habas and Dr. Karen Palter.

College of Scienceand Technology

Advanced instrumentation and spaces that support innovation.

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College of Science
and Technology

Go back to Research Priorities & Departments More in Facilities and Instrumentation