Services - Education & Training
The BMR staff can help you get started on using the instruments for your research. We can offer you one-on-one training on using our instruments and helping you design your experiments.
What kind of training venue works best for your research group in learning about new instrumentation, services or technology?
There are several levels of training venues which can work for MRI/NMR scientists and students.
Newcomers have the opportunity to attend NMR courses in the Department of Chemistry, which gives them a solid introduction into liquid high-resolution NMR. With this basic experience they have to learn magnetic resonance imaging, and the practical implementation of spin physics for in vivo research, to solve biomedical problems in, for example, cancer, neuroscience, musculoskeletal, or cardiovascular biology. These additional skills are normally acquired by working together with a more experienced scientist or student.
In addition, there are graduate courses offered through the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Courses such as Biological Structures explores current methods for high-resolution structure determination. Others are a available through Optical Sciences which give a good introduction into magnetic resonance imaging and advanced medical imaging. Animal handling and surgery are many times part of an in-vivo experiment. In-vivo experiments are time dependent and non standard. Nevertheless, equipment manufacturers offer excellent courses on several different topics for newcomers or scientist which perform standard types of experiments.
In NMR and MRI an ongoing task is to keep up with the new versions of software and pulse-programming techniques. This is more challenging and requires interaction with software and application scientists and engineer of the manufacturer. MRI and NMR research equipment are continuously upgraded and many times debugged by scientists (customers) themselves. Such upgrade many times affect the functionality of a custom made program. It is therefore of great importance to have good communication with the manufacturer. This is in our case an important component of keeping the instruments running at state of the art level. We communicate with our worldwide equipment manufacturers regularly in order to properly support our researchers.
NMR and MRI conferences are another source of learning about new instrumentation and technology. Conferences give new ideas and enables one to establish contacts with research groups applying same or similar techniques. One conference a year should be attended by every scientist.
Core facilities such as the Biological Magnetic Resonance (BMR) have projects which include development of new MRI sequences which are extremely complicated and require knowledge which are only available from specialists at the factory. In such cases it makes a lot of sense to spend time at the factory and work together with the expert there. That is in general more efficient and satisfactory and should be applied more often.
An excellent way of learning about new instrumentation and technology is the exchange of staff scientist or engineer for a period of time, with an equal or similar scientist or engineer of a research laboratory at another university or company. Although this can create some inconveniences and is not always practical, it should be done at regular five or ten year intervals.
For more info, ContactBMR. Also visit the Biotechnology Education & Training Program for other opportunities.
