Scientific Equipment Care

The Crick has an in-house equipment support team who maintain, calibrate and repair the institute’s scientific equipment. From their purpose-built workshop, our team of specialist engineers work on almost all the equipment our scientists use in the lab, from pumps and pipettes to microscopes and centrifuges. 

They can also help scientists with adapting and building new equipment when there’s nothing already available that will do the job. By having the ability to fix and build equipment in-house, our researchers waste less time waiting for external engineers or sending away kit to be fixed.

The Crick’s service engineers come from a diverse range of technical backgrounds. The team is able to support training in scientific equipment engineering and hires apprentices wherever possible.

The scientific equipment care team manages the entire life cycle of a piece of scientific kit. They get it set up when it first arrives, carry out regular maintenance, fix it when it goes wrong and eventually donate, recycle or dispose of equipment that has reached the end of its useful life at the Crick.

By working with Lucia Prieto-Godino’s charity, TReND in Africa, the team has helped to donate equipment from the Crick’s Light Microscopy team to labs in African partner institutions.