Capabilities

TEC staff, facilities, and additional available resources have been put in place to provide the Harvard Medical School community with an innovative and responsive resource to develop the tools and equipment needed to remove technology barriers to your research.

Staff

TEC was established on the Quadrangle on March 6, 2000 and currently consists of two engineers, Dale Larson and Peter Stark (joining in late June).

Dale Larson is the Director of the Technology & Engineering Center. He is a Mechanical Engineer by training, with 20 years of product development experience in industry. His strength is in the design of instrumentation (high troughput hematology analyzer, high speed gas chromatography Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer, immunochemistry analyzers) and laboratory automation (protein extraction from whole blood, high throughput lab design and implementation, custom LIMS). The majority of his experience has been in the medical device (surgical tools, irrigation pumps, viral inactivation systems) and clinical diagnostic fields (invivo viscometer, infectious disease analyzer), with additional experience in scientific instrumentation, telecommunications equipment, and consumer products.

Jin Ji, PhD is the Chief Scientist for the Technology & Engineering Center. She is an Analytical Chemist by training with ten years of academic research experience in designing micro- or nano-scale optical sensors for biological and chemical detection, single cell analysis and drug kinetic studies. She also has five years of industrial experience designing, building and developing miniaturized prototypes and products, which granted her a broad range of optics, engineering and nanofabrication skills.  In TEC, Jin is developing biomedical devices based on periodic nanostructures, surface plasmons and Extraordinary Optical Transmission (EOT).  The devices are to monitor the kinetic of biomolecular interactions, such as protein-protein and protein-small molecule, with extremely high sensitivity, temporal and spatial resolution, and throughput.  Prior to joining TEC Jin worked primarily with fluorescence spectroscopic techniques.

Eugenie Hainsworth is a Senior Instrumentation Development Engineer in the Technology & Engineering Center. She has sixteen years of experience, including over ten years spent developing scientific instrumentation and process control equipment. Her engineering focus is in the areas of fluid mechanics and heat transfer including both modeling and design. Her instrumentation development experience includes: MALDI and electrospray time-of-flight mass spectrometry, high speed gas chromatography, PLC fraction collection, and vacuum systems.

Facilities

TEC has office and laboratory space on the Quadrangle. There are also a two machine shops, one with a machinist, available for fabrication of custom parts, as well as a large and diverse set of shops in the Boston area for fabrication of custom parts. The laboratory is equipped with a standard complement of mechanical and electrical engineering tools and equipment, and prototype assembly capabilities. TEC uses 3D Solids Modeling CAD tools, and, optical and process simulation software tools to improve the quality and speed of our development efforts.

When necessary TEC staff use their network to arrange for consultants and design firms to join the development team to supplement the skills of the researchers and TEC staff.

Skills

Collectively the TEC staff, including an electrical/software engineer planned for hire in early fall of 2000, have skills and experience in:

• Mechanical and Machine design
• Electronics design
• Software development
• Optics
• Fluid mechanics
• Biochemical process design
• Plastic Part design
• Prototype fabrication and testin