September Session : Core Facility Benchmarking

Summary

One of the most common questions that Core Facility (CF) staff and managers, as well as institutional directors, ask is: “how is my CF performing?”  This session will help CF staff by presenting case studies of evaluations, Key Performance Indicators and multi-CF comparability studies across various geographical regions and types of institutions.

Video recording & slides

Moderators

Kateřina (Vágnerová) Hošková
Deputy Head of Grant Administration Department, Core Facilities Manager
CEITEC
Brno, Czech Republic

Joshua Rappoport
Executive Director, Research Infrastructure
Boston College
Boston, USA

Agenda & Speakers

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Reviewing Core Facilities: when we all learn
Being appointed for an external panel to review the Core Facilities department of any institution is a most interesting endeavor. From my experience, if the review is appropriately conducted, it can be certainly helpful for the staff and managers of the facilities that are reviewed, but it is also undoubtedly a learning experience for the reviewers themselves. At the end, it is all about contrasting different ways of addressing the same issues, and there are no universal answers. In my presentation I will review briefly which aspects from core facilities performance are more frequently the focus of discussion, and some of the lessons learnt.

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Fernando Peláez
Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO)
Madrid, Spain

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Global Benchmarking of Research Core Facilities
In spite of the challenges of research funding, core facility managers at research institutions worldwide face increasing expectations for facility usage and operation with higher efficacy and efficiency. In this session, I will present and discuss preliminary results from a survey through which core facility managers shared their strategies for staffing, operation, research, training, financial management and performance evaluation. This knowledge may provide valuable references that can help understanding, or even quantifying, how well individual facilities are performing, as well as identifying opportunities for improvement and meeting defined goals.

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Marta Monteiro
Head of Flow Cytometry and Antibodies
Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência

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Benchmarking of leading research organizations in the EU-13 countries
Alliance4Life (A4L) is a bottom-up initiative of ten leading life science institutions from nine EU-13 countries that aims at closing the divide in European health research and innovation. The presentation will introduce the research funding structure of A4L member institutions showing high share (85%) of competition-based funding, which affects long-term strategic planning of infrastructure development. The implementation progress of core facility concepts in A4L institutions depends on funding environment and research performance indicators evaluated at national level. Presentation will cover core facility operation examples from A4L institutions.

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Maija Dambrova
Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis, Riga Stradins University

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