About Us
Common Equipment and Technical Support
The Common Equipment and Technical Services core facility (CETS) provides access to common equipment and quality research technical assistance to Faculty members and research personnel based primarily in Roger Guindon. The core is guided by a committee of principal investigators and technical officers who advise and vote to support changes, improvements and acquisition of new common equipment. Our mandate extends to:
- Maintenance of common equipment and user training
- Research technical assistance for individual laboratories
- Provision of glasswashing and autoclave services
- Out-of-hours monitoring of freezers and incubators
The CETS benefits all laboratories in Roger Guindon because most labs do not own some of the basic and/or technologically advanced equipment items that are essential to the efficiency and success of their work. Our technical staff maintain this diverse suite of common equipment in a state of operational readiness and peak performance, and provide both one-on-one and group training upon request.
To coordinate the use of common equipment, the CETS provides an Online Booking System. While the majority of available instruments must be booked in advance, some do not require a reservation (but do have log books next to them that need to be filled out). Users should refer to the Common Equipment List to check whether or not a specific instrument is bookable.
All requests for technical support must be submitted by email (techsupp@uottawa.ca). For urgent assistance, users can phone our pager number (613-739-0317, please leave a numeric phone number and your call will be returned).
NEW COVID19 REGULATIONS:
To optimize equipment access while maintaining safe physical distancing, some instruments have been moved. Signage has been posted outside all common equipment rooms, to indicate how many people can be in the room at one time, and which instruments can be used safely at the same time (>2m apart).
To help users plan their experiments, we have assembled a collection of these new common equipment room maps, which can be found here.