Inside the "Dream Factory"
When the century-old rotating domes at the Allegheny Observatory began to fail—their original wheels literally crumbling after a hundred years of use—there was no catalog to order replacements from. The machine shops that once produced such parts have largely disappeared. So a machinist in the Dietrich School's Shared Research Support Services (SRSS) designed and custom-built new wheels and carriages, using a five-axis mill the University had originally purchased to support quantum computing research. With that, a piece of 100-year-old technology was made ready to run for another century.
It is exactly the kind of problem SRSS exists to solve. SRSS is a constellation of nearly a dozen specialized facilities and roughly 30 staff members that, as a Dietrich School researcher once put it, functions as a "dream factory" for the school's science.
"We have the instrumentation facilities that make research possible, but we also have shops that repair those instruments and create brand-new apparatuses that have never existed before," says Pete Chambers, the Director of SRSS. "Those shops work hand-in-hand with graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to create one-of-a-kind solutions that let our faculty test new ideas and break new ground."
Chambers oversees the unit's scientific, staffing, and financial performance, a role he has held for 12 years, and one he says he more or less fell into. Created to pull facility management out of individual departments and into a central operation, the director position was a natural fit for Chambers, who had been a customer of most of the facilities he now manages. In this unique role, Chambers says what he enjoys most is the sheer variety of science that crosses his desk.
Offers Chambers, "One day I might be talking with someone in biology who's working on bird calls, the next day it's volcanology, then quantum computing, then drug discovery. Bouncing between all of those fields is really exciting for me because the science is so interesting."
By consolidating capabilities, SRSS spares the school from maintaining twenty versions of the same instrument when one will do, freeing resources to invest in higher-end equipment that enables more work and increasingly ambitious science.
"At the core, we're here to enable the science," Chambers says.
The people of SRSS span a remarkable range of expertise. SRSS's instrumentation facilities are run by PhD-level research scientists who are experts in their particular techniques. Much of their work is educational: teaching graduate students not only how to operate sophisticated instruments but also how to interpret the data they produce. Those same scientists collaborate with faculty on cutting-edge projects, co-author papers, and help draft the major grants that bring new instrumentation to the University.
Then there are the shops: electronics, machine, and glass. Staffed by highly skilled craftspeople and engineers, they handle repairs but also a great deal of original design work—and, Chambers notes, there is an art to it. Sometimes a researcher arrives with a fully realized design and a simple question: “Can you make it?” More often, they show up with an idea sketched on the back of a napkin, and the shop teams help turn it into something real.
According to Chambers, that variety is part of the appeal for the people in SRSS.
"If you're an electronics technician or machinist in industry, you're usually working on the same product over and over," Chambers says. "Our people do one-offs for everything."
A crew of engineers in the electronics shop, for instance, contributes to high-energy physics projects with the Department of Physics and Astronomy, including work connected to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. One of those engineers recently developed an inexpensive muon detector now used by the Physics Department to bring hands-on science to undergraduates, and even high school students, who might not otherwise have access to it.
The University's only full-time scientific glassblower works in SRSS as well, crafting specialized glassware, including scintillation counters used in CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a skill that has earned him authorship on scientific publications. He is, in fact, the only full-time scientific glassblower in the region; institutions like Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne turn to SRSS when they need custom designs. It is a vanishing craft, which makes the expertise all the rarer.
Rounding out the team are animal care and husbandry staff, a research stockroom, and a campus helium recovery operation. What unites this varied group, Chambers says, is a service orientation.
"Our team doesn't usually get headlines when the science comes out, but everyone takes pride in doing their part to keep things moving."
Leading such a technically diverse team suits Chambers, whose own career wound through solid-state physics, drug discovery, and animal research before he arrived at SRSS. That breadth, he jokes, gives him just enough knowledge across fields "to be dangerous"—enough to understand why a researcher is stuck and to connect them with the resources to get unstuck, even when he can't supply the solution himself. Mostly, he credits an outstanding team and steady institutional backing; now working under his third Dietrich School dean, he says each administration has been understanding and supportive.
"My group is pretty selfless, and that's important for what we do,” says Chambers. "We're here to help people get projects off the ground quickly, bring in new grant money, and generate accurate, timely data in the most efficient way possible."
Balancing the needs of so many is a genuine challenge. The shops alone work with more than 200 principal investigators in research groups across the school and beyond. His team's task is to honor the intensity and importance of each research program while treating everyone equitably.
For faculty and students who don't yet know what SRSS offers, Chambers's message is direct: "We're here to help." And if his team doesn't have a particular capability, he is quick to point out that SRSS is only one piece of a larger campus network of shared facilities, including extensive operations in the Health Sciences and Hillman Cancer Center.
"If we don't have something someone needs," he says, "there is probably another facility on campus that does."
Faculty and students can explore the full range of SRSS capabilities, organized by type of service, at researchservices.pitt.edu.
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