Often overlooked and deserving of more recognition, the research and teaching technicians are the lifeblood that keeps our campus labs and equipment up and running. Without them, the vast majority of our STEM courses would be unable to deliver the vital practical skills our students need to excel within their respective fields. I therefore thought it would be well worth my time spending a couple of hours learning about all the incredible things they get up to in a day to shine the spotlight on these irreplaceable members of our support staff.

I was fortunate enough to be able to tag along with two of our wonderful LEC teaching technicians – the double act of Kate O’Driscoll and Cate Morgan – to learn more about what their typical day in the LEC teaching labs looks like. Cate has been at Lancaster for quite a while now – she completed her MSci in Ecology and Conservation back in 2019 at Lancaster, and then after a couple of years working with the Ribble Rivers Trust doing biomonitoring, returned to Lancaster as a technician! Kate, meanwhile, has been with us for two and a half years after spending 16 years as Assistant Head of Biology at Dallam Secondary School. She has a background in Environmental Science, specialising in marine environments. Both provide support for the plethora of environment-based courses we run here at Lancaster – and with nearly 20 different programmes across four disciplines, that’s an awful lot of labs to run. We’re in the middle of term right now, and boy do they have a lot on their plates!

We started the day in the inventively-named “Lab A”, where Kate showed me a typical weekly schedule. They run multiple labs multiple times during the course of the week to ensure that all students on their respective courses get a chance to undertake the lab. Each lab runs for roughly one to four hours, with most being about three hours long – although that doesn’t include set up and pack down. Kate says that during term time, most of their days are occupied with setting up for the days’ labs and then cleaning up afterwards! They also have weekly, termly, and yearly lab checks they have to carry out to make sure that everything in the lab is safe and working. A large part of their job is also making sure that the students are carrying out safe working practices, handing out lab coats, goggles, and hair bobbles to anyone who might’ve forgotten their PPE!

Kate with her trusty weekly timetable!

Last week’s labs were quite a mixed bunch; they had students examining the sediment in sand dunes on one day, a geology module making extensive use of the microscopes on another, and ecology students looking at invertebrates on a different day! Whilst efforts are made to try and put the different labs on different days, sometimes timings mean that the technicians are having to run completely different labs consecutively, meaning that they have all on ensuring everything is set up on time.

The ecology lab in particular required a fair amount of preparation, as the students were examining a wide range of species to understand locomotion in legged as well as naturally legless invertebrates. This lab had a host of specimens on display for students to look at. Live snails and worms brought in by the lecturer (and then lovingly re-released at the end of the lab); molluscs, starfish, and butterflies, courtesy of LEC’s extensive specimen drawers; and an octopus, courtesy of the Morrison’s fishmonger counter (no technicians were required to do the deep-sea trawling to catch him, I was assured):

A selection of invertebrates used in the ecology lab – no snails were harmed during the taking of this photo. The same cannot be said for the dried starfish.

Today’s lab is a geology practical, but the students will just be looking at maps and identifying features in them – so no mass of glassware to clean up this time! Each lab is run by an accademic, usually with the support of a PhD demonstrator who helps the students during the practical session. PhD student Rory is the willing victim of today’s lab and has been working with Kate a lot over the past few weeks running various geology labs.

Rory and his geology maps, ready for the students lining up outside the door

For other labs, there is a wide range of equipment available for the students to use. Lab A is equipped with a maze of side rooms full of specialist equipment from soil furnaces and a cold room, to its own plant growth room.

The plant growth room (minus the plants!)

Kate and her fellow technicians also have several storerooms full of supplies, specimens, and samples for all of the many different labs they carry out over the course of the year. Much of their time is also spent liaising with academics to ensure that everything they need to carry out their practicals is set up ahead of time.

Samples set out for a geology lab next term, ready to rock and roll!

The second Cate in our duo then took me through the bowels of the LEC building to “Lab J”, one of the older teaching labs in the Centre. This lab is more of a “wet chemistry” lab and is predominantly used for environmental chemistry practicals that involve soil, water, and air pollution analysis. This does mean that they have several very cool bits of kit – such as the Flame Photometer, which is used to measure the amounts of lithium, sodium, and potassium within samples. As the name suggests, it uses fire to vaporise the samples, so is necessarily hooked up to a propane tank in order to work. It is apparently very popular with students!

Cate with her nemesis, the Flame Photometer

A slightly older but no less impressive piece of kit is the atomic absorption spectrometer (AAS) kept in the back room, which uses different lamps to measure the light absorption at different wavelengths in a sample – often an aerosolised liquid.

The AAS may be an old girl, but she has a few tricks up her sleeve!

The sample is passed through a high-temperature source (such as a flame) which breaks it down into its atomic components. These atoms absorb the light emitted by the lamps, with the amount of light absorbed measured by a detector. Based on what wavelengths of light absorbed within the AAS, we’re able to see what concentrations of different elements were in the sample. Since this machine uses the explosive acetylene to produce its flame, this sensibly isn’t stored in the lab!

As one might expect with a wet chemistry lab, a lot of the kit is mostly flasks and beakers, which have to be washed and sorted at the end of each lab. Fortunately, their brand-new dishwasher does most of the washing for them these days, but much of the glassware needs to be rinsed prior to the big wash!

A clean set of flasks, freshly washed by Cate and her partners in grime!

Used chemicals are safely and appropriately disposed of at the end of each lab, and glassware stored according to type in their storeroom. Many of the labs in LEC have the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) certificate (which denotes the lab as taking actions towards becoming more sustainable), so a strong emphasis is placed on ensuring equipment is reused and recycled as much as possible to reduce waste.

The storeroom in Lab J. No one is really sure what dice were used for….

And there you have it, a slightly manic day in the labs of our teaching technicians! Cate and Kate will be hard at work prepping for labs all throughout term, so spare a thought for them and their fellow technicians when you see them hurrying around the faculty – we couldn’t run without them!

Related Blogs

• 

  A day in the lab with...Dave Hughes in the Stable Isotope Facility

• 

  This Week in the Teaching Technician Team of Lancaster Environment Centre

• 

  LEC Voices presents Dr Suzi Ilic, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) EDI Lead.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.