A Truly Next-Gen BioImaging Facility

Vanderbilt backed up their commitment to being a world leader in next-generation technology development with a substantial investment toward building a custom designed space on the 6th Floor of the beautiful Engineering and Science Building (ESB), with the unique design requirements of the BioMIID program in mind. Our team was intimately involved in the decision-making with architects and campus planners, to make sure domain-specific elements of the space were considered. In addition to being aesthetically pleasing, core elements of this multi-year build-out for BioMIID included critical engineering and architectural requirements to address constraints related to the high-resolution imaging central to BioMIID's mission. These included mechanical, temperature, acoustics, and vibration -related concerns. In addition to the aforementioned, a highly data-centric design accommodates the formidable data acquisition, networking, storage, and computational demands of BioMIID's fleet of instrumentation.

Tooling and Laboratories

In addition to custom microscopes, we extend access to various tools for building optical systems, analyzing image data, and designing tailored experiments for biomedical research.

Innovation & Fabrication Lab

Central to all things BioMIID! It's where ideas become prototypes, prototypes become parts, and parts become assemblies for the next generation systems... Or simply where essential bits and bobs are created to solve practical, day-to-day problems! Here, you'll find much more than the essential optical components: it's stocked with general tooling, drills & taps, soldering/electronics equipment, construction rails, a plasma cleaner, testing equipment, 3D printers, and perhaps most important, an environment that encourages the team to explore ideas!

Deployed Instruments Space

Right across the hall from our microscope development and fabrication space is the Optics Anteroom branching out into the Specimen Prep Lab and the distributed Imaging Rooms. Each room is dedicated to one, or maximum of two imaging systems, and their close proximity to the development space makes maintenance, troubleshooting, and system upgrades efficient.

Specimen Prep Lab

Biosafety cabinets, incubators, specimen prep station, dissection equipment, and equipment for primary screening of prepped samples. BSL-2 level, and readily supports an impressive diversity of sample types prior to imaging.*

*Subject to biosafety review and approval

Image Analysis Studio

This space serves as a high-efficiency conduit to our remote, centralized, and high-performance compute and storage. Such a setup removes the [substantial] noise, heat, and vibration typical of local compute resources, and regularly a burden during long data analysis sessions. It additionally conveys an ideal learning, teaching, and demonstration space in combination with multiple high-resolution displays. This is a space where our students, staff, faculty, and collaborators regularly like to "group think" all things imaging.

Data Facility

We are intimately aware of the burden of "big data", and readily acknowledge that without tools to address it, the promise of next generation instrumentation can be stifled. A key part of our "data-centric" design philosophy was isolated space for high end data storage and compute, connected via a dedicated single mode fiber network. We house multi-petabyte class storage specific for our facility, co-localized with high end, remotely accessible, -compute to facilitate collaborator engagement. This proximal, but strategically-isolated, space addresses acoustics, vibration, heat, and power/backup requirements that are difficult to manage when kept within an imaging space.

Allied Expertise

BioMIID maintains close scientific relationships with experts close by to support users with specific fabrication needs and project-based applications.

Andrea Locke Laboratory
Department of Chemistry

Our neighboring lab, the Andrea Locke Laboratory, is a critical source of knowledge and technical support on nanoparticles and Raman spectroscopy.

Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (VINSE)

Our collaboration with VINSE provides expertise in nanofabrication, lithography, microfluidic devices, nanoparticle analysis, and electron microscopy.

The Wond'ry
Vanderbilt University School of Engineering

The Wond'ry provides access to exciting prototyping tools, electronic makerspaces, design labs, and expert consulting!