The Lab Portal is a service-focused program meant to reduce inefficiency encountered by academic departments and their faculty when starting, moving or closing research labs at UCLA. The program and its team members reside within the research safety division of Environment, Health & Safety (EH&S). In support of their mission, they provide services and resources to facilitate the safe and efficient transfer of space during these changes and thereby reduce delays to research activities.
Services provided by the current team include:
The Lab Portal program was founded in 2016 with only two people from EH&S lab safety working on it part-time.
Since then, it has grown to five team members and expanded the scope of services beyond its original narrow focus on laboratory safety requirements. The current members of the Lab Portal team include Jack Bracken, program manager; Diana Perez Saldivar, operations coordinator; Jose Corral, new lab set-ups; Joey Callahan, outreach; and Erika de Guzman, moves and close-outs.
Together, they work tirelessly to track the ever-changing landscape of research at UCLA, develop new resources for distribution and meet with PIs and department representatives across campus when they need help with renovating, setting-up, closing-out or relocating their research labs. The impact of their work is staggering considering that 40-60 new research faculty joined UCLA, more than 20 labs have moved and nearly 30 labs have closed each year since 2016. All of this work is in addition to the team members’ other duties as lab, chemical and biological safety specialists.
2020 promises to be a big year for the Lab Portal team, as their partnerships with other campus research stakeholders, including Facilities Management, the Office of Research Administration and numerous academic departments and schools, keep developing and expanding. In the coming year they will be reaching out across UCLA Administration to start new collaborations to improve the coordination of those support services that help campus research thrive.
Photos at rIght, from top: Jack Bracken, Diana Perez-Saldivar
Photos below, left to right: Jose Corral, Joey Callahan, Erika de Guzman
The Lab Portal team can be reached by emailing labportal@ehs.ucla.edu.
