The purpose of this piece is to introduce people who are not intimately familiar with laboratory work to the basics of laboratory operations and the role that informatics can play in assisting scientists, engineers, and technicians in their efforts. The concepts are important because they provide a functional foundation for understanding lab work and how that work is done in the early part of the twenty-first century (things will change, just wait for it).
Intended audience
This material is intended for anyone who is interested in seeing how modern informatics tools can help those doing scientific work. It will provide an orientation to scientific and laboratory work, as well as the systems that have been developed to make that work more productive. It’s for people coming out of school who have carried out lab experiments but not corporate research projects, for those who need to understand how testing labs work, and for IT professionals who may be faced with supporting computing systems in lab environments. It’s also for those who may be tasked with managing projects to choose, install, and make informatics tools useful.
Figure 1 shows the elements we’ll be discussing in this piece. The treatment of the technical material will be on the lighter side, leaving in-depth subject matter to other works. Instrument data systems will be covered lightly, as any serious discussion becomes lengthy and discipline-specific very quickly; additionally, that material has been covered in other works.
| Figure 1. Elements we’ll be covering |
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Laboratory Systems Engineering 