How the GCI Shared Facility went from empty calendars to a fully booked operation, by making every resource discoverable and bookable in seconds.
By the numbers
150+
Research facilities
Labs sharing instruments across institutions and visibility.
3,000+
Shared resources
Equipment, services, and expertise listed for discovery.
100,000+
Hours booked
Time on shared instruments — scheduled, not double-booked.
They thought they had a booking problem. The real issue was visibility.
Real stories from researchers who've been through it. The good, the bad, and the accidentally-contaminated.
I ran an 8-hour cell culture experiment. At hour 7, I went to grab PBS for the final wash steps and the stock was completely empty. Nobody had updated the shared inventory spreadsheet. Eight hours of careful work, scrapped because of a missing bottle of buffer.
Our department spent $47,000 on a new lyophilizer. Three weeks after it arrived, I found out biochemistry two floors up had the exact same model sitting unused for months. Forty-seven thousand dollars because nobody could see what equipment was already in the building.
I showed up at 6 AM for time-sensitive live-cell imaging on the confocal. Another grad student was already there. We had both been 'confirmed' through separate email chains. My cells had been prepped for 48 hours. I lost irreplaceable biological samples because two people replied to two different emails.
A new postdoc joined and it took 6 weeks before she could independently use all the equipment she needed. Training records lived in three different spreadsheets owned by three different people. Two instruments had no training records at all.
Our centrifuge failed mid-run and destroyed 3 months of protein purification samples. Maintenance had been overdue by 4 months. The service contract had a maintenance schedule, but it lived in a filing cabinet in the admin office. Nobody looked at it.
My PI needed equipment utilization data for a CFI grant renewal. I spent 2 full weeks compiling booking data from email threads, paper sign-up sheets, and Google Calendars across 4 different labs. Two weeks of my time to produce one table for a grant application.
Our building had 12 negative-80 freezers across 6 labs. Nobody knew which ones had space. People kept cramming samples into the two closest to the elevator until one failed from being overpacked. We lost irreplaceable patient tissue samples that took two years to collect.
Three people in my lab ran the same Western blot protocol last month and got wildly different results. One used the shared Google Doc version from 2021, another a printout from 2019, and the third a version I had emailed as an attachment. Three versions, and nobody knew which was current.
Every researcher has a story they tell over tea. Share yours.