Meet the Team: Lee Stanyer

I’ve been at UCL for 27 years, starting as a PhD student in the Department of Medicine, followed by several post-doctoral positions, the latter at the Institute of Neurology. I then opted to become lab operations manager for the IoN Department of Molecular Neuroscience and subsequently for the Department of Neurodegenerative Disease. 

I joined the IoN-DRI Programme team in June 2018, as laboratory infrastructure lead. I was eager to be involved in this exciting new capital development as this was a position where I could contribute to the design of an entire research building as well as putting forward suggestions as to how we can improve our collective laboratory operations.

My current role involves developing all of the laboratory and central services areas throughout the building, as well as running a number of transformation initiatives that improve the way we work.

When I first started working on the programme, we were asked to define how we could improve our current operations and together with Kully Sunner, Lab Operations Lead and Mike Brown, Director of Biological Services, we came up with a range of 81 different services that we wanted to provide.

As far as lab infrastructure is concerned that meant including centralised service functions such an autoclave & glasswash facility, biorepository, cryostore, freezerbank, sample processing, cell screening, etc. 

We then packaged these services into a number of initiatives for effective planning and delivery and they were then reviewed and approved by governance committees before implementation began. 

Another major part of my role has been to work with Hawkins\ Brown architects,  M&E (mechanical and electrical) contractors, specialist third-party suppliers and project managers Arcadis to come up with detailed designs for primary laboratories, shared cellular laboratories, shared secondary spaces and all of the central service areas and goods yard arrangements.

When I came to the project, the architects had already reached a design stage where the basic outline of the building had been defined. We then worked together to allocate specific functions to those spaces, going back and forth over a period of between six and 12 months to make sure the spaces incorporated what we needed them to. 

I put together a working group of around 12-13 people to provide feedback and input into the design, made up of representatives from every department throughout the Institute. It included current users such as senior postdocs and PI's as well as lab managers and technical staff. Many have worked in laboratories for decades and so we were probably calling on several centuries of collective experience!  

Once a basic design had been achieved, we reviewed with our working group before presenting to our governance groups who made the decision on whether the designs were appropriate and should be approved to be part of the building design.

All of our decisions are made in this way – gathering information to make proposals based on our experience and input from working groups, taking these to a range of governance groups for approval, refining and tweaking until we get it right. It’s never just one individual making a decision – there’s a lot of people involved.

I am really looking forward to a brand-new building with state-of-the-art technologies, and facilities, but the thing that excites me most is that we finally have a centralised technical team of lab managers and lab support services. 

It should take a lot of the routine aspects of laboratory management and maintenance away from research staff and students and allow them to concentrate on their research, which will hopefully mean greater research outputs.

I’m also thrilled that many people who were previously on short-term contracts will now have much more stability, a broader range of development opportunities and defined routes of progression.