Short Course Description

Liquid Handling Boot Camp — A Beginner's Hands-On Introduction to Lab Automation

Any beginner or novice user or person interested in learning about lab automation in a hands-on environment. 1/3 of the class time will be lecture and 2/3 will be hands on work with the robots.

How You'll Benefit From This Course

• Familiarized with the terminology and methods of automated liquid handling
• Learn optimal pipetting techniques and get an easy to use reference
• Learn about reagent and chemical compatibility issues
• Become aware of validation/QC testing techniques and options
• Discuss proper decontamination techniques
• Try hands-on operations on real liquid handling robots with liquids of various viscosities and handling "issues"

Course Topics

• Introduction to liquid handling robots
• Safety issues
• Pipetting terminology, issues and techniques
• Reagent and chemical compatibility and handling issues
• Validation and QC techniques and options
• Proper decontamination protocols
• Hands-on pipetting on real robots with aqueous liquids of varying viscosities

Protective lab glasses or goggles will be provided if desired.

Course Fee: US $600/$700*

Course Format: Lecture

Class Limit: 24

Instructors:

Douglas Gurevitch University of California, San Diego San Diego, California USA

Douglas Gurevitch received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at UCSB in 1990. He is a registered Professional Engineer. He started his career working on medical instrument manufacture and development at New Image Industries. In 1995, he joined Sequana Therapeutics (later Axys Pharmaceuticals). As head of the Instrumentation Group, he optimized robot operations, developed custom integrated robotic systems, instituted standard engineering practices, and investigated new technologies. In 2000 he joined Biocept as Director of Microarray Automation, automating the production of proprietary microarray technology using off-the-shelf and custom robotic solutions while managing the engineering efforts of the company. He has been the staff Senior Development Engineer for the Department of Bioengineering at UCSD since 2002. There his responsible for running the instructional labs, facilities design and support for the department, and laboratory safety.

Douglas has presented at various LabAutomation meetings since 1997 and has published twice in JALA, for which he served as Executive Editor for 2007 and 2008. He was Program Chair for LabAutomation2006 and Associate Program Chair for 2005. He was the founding chair of the San Diego chapter of the Laboratory Robotics Interest Group. He has taught courses on the laboratory automation issues or techniques either at UCSD or as a short course since 1998.

Petar Stojadinović National University Sacramento, California USA Petar@kissprincipleinc.com

Petar Stojadinović received numerous Service of Excellence Awards from the Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) where he served several years as a Scientific Committee Member, organizer, short course Instructor and educational coordinator bridging conference short courses with university credits, Guest Editor for the Journal for the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), and the organizer of the Software Supplement to JALA. As Founder and Executive Chair of the Bay Area Laboratory Robotics Interest Group, Biotech Forums, and the Southern California Nanosig and Nano Forums he organized forums for education, business, and technology.

He has numerous patents in Drug Discovery, Genomics, Bio-informatics, and has advised various labs in their growth, sales/marketing, and processes. Petar consults companies on their technology and business developments, performs corporate training with New Horizons as a Project Management Professional Trainer, Microsoft Certified Trainer, and Oracle Certified Trainer, and teaches business and technology at National University. His training website is www.automationtrainer.com.

As a corporate partner for Knowledgeable Information System Solutions (KISS) Principle Inc., he helped develop an open platform Naval and Government asset management system and a Bio-Banking Bio-Medical Asset Management solution abbreviated B.A.M.™ for the life science market offering associated products for helping businesses save money by predicting cost and ROI's. The sophisticated ERP system manages laboratory and IT assets, inventories and tracks assets, and remote controls assets. It can conduct process and cost analysis, merger/acquisition and move planning, and calculates usage and a TOC Cost Reduction. B.A.M.™ is fully integrated product with inventory, procurement, auto discovery of lab equipment, help desk, work & service order tracking, document management, calibration and more that may work with existing LIMS, sample management, scheduling, work flow, and financial systems. The B.A.M.™ project uses the ASTM AnIML XML data exchange standard, proposed Laboratory Performance Markup Language (LabPML), and the Service in Management Performance Markup Language (SiMPL) for tracking usage, productivity, and performance.

Justin Provchy Amgen, Inc. Thousand Oaks, California USA

Justin Provchy has worked since 2003 as an Automation Engineer in the Research & Automation Technologies group at Amgen implementing and supporting automated systems for assays in preclinical research and development. He received his Masters of Bioscience in 2003 at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences.

* higher fee applies to those who are not ALA members