Responding to COVID-19 The university adjusts to life during the pandemic
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niversity labs are hives of activity where experiments are conducted, materials grown, and discoveries made night and day. We don’t think of them as being closed — ever. But on March 18, Vice Chancellor for Research Joseph Incandela ordered all labs at UC Santa Barbara to be closed temporarily and all research halted, except for a few exceptions, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus spread, most faculty PIs across campus saw the closure coming and immediately joined their graduate students and lab staff to take the necessary steps to prepare. Here’s how the process looked to some and how it might impact research going forward. Materials professor Stephen Wilson and his graduate students grow many of their samples in a furnace lab in Elings Hall, and that equipment, he says, “can simply be turned off.” He currently does a weekly safety walk-through of the lab and says that the biggest challenges of the closure were “the administrative delays and figuring out how to run our group remotely.” The collaborative nature of Wilson’s work, however, means that partners feel the ripples of the closure. “We provide samples for people to study nationally and internationally,” he says. “Collaborators are waiting for us to provide them with samples, and we have no idea when we will be able to do that again.” “Some processes can be stopped and some cannot,” says Ram Seshadri, professor of materials and chemistry and director of the UCSB Materials Research Laboratory. “This is definitely a setback. You can’t immediately stop and start.” “It’s incredibly painful for the researchers, because lab work is at the core of what they do,” says Kurt Olsson, who manages the MBE (molecular beam epitaxy) lab. Because Olsson’s position requires him to “plan for the unexpected,” he was able to put equipment in a safe state and stop processes without losing work over the course of a week. “Nothing is lost except time and opportunity,” he says. Still, he adds, “The PIs and researchers work so hard towards their goals, and having to pause is really devastating. We’re trying to
An uncharacteristically empty Elings Hall lab during the COVID-19 campus closure.
operate at as low a level as possible to save power and consumables, like liquid nitrogen, without turning everything off and costing researchers time and money.” The MBE process involves bringing materials to high temperatures to deposit thin films of low-defect crystals, and the ultra-high-vacuum MBE chambers where that occurs need to be as clean as possible to produce high-quality films. “It is important to minimize maintenance,” Olsson says. “If we were to completely shut down everything, we would have to open the systems to reload materials, which is an extremely expensive process. We have molten metals in the systems, and if they freeze, they’ll damage the equipment. We’ve essentially idled the systems, leaving critical components on and turning off as much as we can. Once research resumes, we can bring everything back up in a matter of days.” Graduate students in materials and other labs are feeling the effects of the COVID shutdown. “In our group, we grow and measure a lot of samples, and we had to stop all of that activity,” says Wilson. “Depending on where students are in their dissertation work, some have enough results so that they can pivot during this pause from doing lab work to writing up their results. But a lot of first- and second-year students don’t have enough results, so the shutdown is holding them back.” STEPHEN WILSON Seshadri echoed that. “If my students are very early in their PhDs, they’re learning; those who
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A lot of firstand secondyear students don’t have enough results, so the shutdown is holding them back.
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