BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

Ding! Oversized elevator doors open onto a cavernous underground space that hums with energy, a faint orange glow emanating from the clean room space ahead. Walking closer to the facility, you see museum-style placards affixed to the windows that provide a self-guided tour of sorts and gallery views into the massive clean room beyond.

“This is a Class 100 (ISO 5) certified facility with over 2,800 square feet under filters. It houses 30-plus instruments and eight wet bench chemical workstations, providing access to technologies from the semiconductor and microfabrication industries,” reads one of the placards. More signs just like it line the hallway as far as the eye can see, hallmarks of an institution that’s rightly proud of its advanced laboratory spaces — and this clean room is just one of them.

Across Rice, underneath buildings like the Space Science and Technology Building, the 250,000-square-foot, newly built Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering Science and the 477,000-square-foot BioScience Research Collaborative, you’ll find the vast network of facilities that make up Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority (SEA).

We have incredibly good scientists who know their job and know the science, and they are the lifeblood of this whole thing. Instruments are great, but they don’t work without people.

—James McNew

A dozen core lab facilities comprise the 30,000-square-foot SEA. It is spread across eight campus buildings, managed by a large team of experts and overseen by an 18-member faculty governance board drawn from 10 stakeholder departments. More than 1,500 researchers — both within Rice and from outside the university — use its scanning electron microscopes, DNA analyzers, high-temperature furnace, wafer polishers, 3D laser lithography systems and other cutting-edge equipment every year. Want to use a Elionix e-beam lithography system to etch something that’s only 7 nanometers in width? This is the place. Need to use a Titan, the world’s most powerful, commercially available scanning transmission electron microscope to conduct research at the atomic level? Come to Rice.

“We exist to make research at Rice more effective, to make sure this equipment serves everybody,” said Tim Gilheart, the SEA director of operations. “We’re a force multiplier.”

Gilheart oversaw the 2018 renovation of the Space Science and Technology Building that added 6,000 square feet of clean room space and 2,500 square feet of Class 100 (ISO 5) space — so clean it boasts less than 100 particles per cubic foot of air. He has also spent 17 years at Rice watching with pride as the university has invested millions of dollars into creating a network of such facilities dedicated to serving research scientists like himself as well as students. There are very few barriers to undergraduates using these multimillion-dollar labs, he noted, in keeping with Rice’s traditional emphasis on providing exceptional undergraduate research opportunities.

But the SEA is more than just massive microscopes and nanofabs, he’s quick to point out. After all, someone needs to monitor those undergrads, someone needs to know how to maintain each delicate piece of equipment, and someone needs to oversee the complex 24/7 ecosystem to ensure professors and scientists are able to access the labs when needed.

“This organization is not just the machinery,” Gilheart said. “It’s also the people. The average level of expertise on this team is more than 20 years.”

The SEA has grown from an unprepossessing one-person lab with one piece of equipment to a 24-person team during its 24 years of its existence, recalled James McNew, professor of biosciences and faculty chair of the SEA Board.

“When I came here in 2000, I needed to do some hardcore cell biology and needed electron microscopy — and there was a relatively new transmission electron microscope literally across the hall from my lab, which was part of the reason I came,” McNew said. “It was a good recruiting tool.”

Back then, McNew recalled, Rice excelled when it came to purchasing equipment but hadn’t yet poured the resources into the staffing it needed to maintain those important recruiting tools. And so over the course of the next two dozen years, he, Gilheart and a committed team of Rice researchers and faculty members began recruiting employees in earnest to ensure that for every magnificent microscope or maskless photolithography system, personnel were in place to keep them up and running while also teaching others how to use them.

Here, we’re going to make a transistor in some weird material that was synthesized in one of our material science labs, or we’re going to take silicon and make some new embedded photonic device that detects nitrous oxide in the blood that has never existed before, that nobody has ever tried before. That’s what we do at Rice.

—Tim Gilheart

Today, Rice’s SEA technical staff is composed of 21 research scientists with an M.S. or a Ph.D. in their field, with a team of three administrators who keep the entire operation functioning smoothly.

“The SEA is the people who run it,” said McNew. “We have incredibly good scientists who know their job and know the science, and they are the lifeblood of this whole thing. Instruments are great, but they don’t work without people.”

And as Rice continues to invest in both the people and the instruments themselves, Gilheart said, he’s continually blown away by the discoveries taking place within the experimental fabrication facilities, the laboratories and the new innovation spaces across campus.

“We can make all kinds of things here — we could make a classic silicon transistor, for instance, but that’s not interesting. That’s not research,” Gilheart said.

“Here, we’re going to make a transistor in some weird material that was synthesized in one of our material science labs, or we’re going to take silicon and make some new embedded photonic device that detects nitrous oxide in the blood that has never existed before, that nobody has ever tried before,” he said. “That’s what we do at Rice.”