Hello, I’m Patty Jones. I'm the Associate Director for Research. Welcome to the Beckman Institute
Welcome to the Arnold Beckman rotunda. This building is 313,000 square feet and
about a thousand people work here every day across a variety of different research areas. So let's go
into the main atrium and I'll tell you a little bit more about the architecture of this building.
So our building is more than 30 years old and as you can see, it's still beautiful. We have this
gigantic atrium with the skylights and the concept of the atrium is that it's meant to feel like main
street. It actually has these main street like lights in it and at the other end of the atrium,
we have a cafe and a big auditorium and other spaces for large groups. And the atrium is often
used for gatherings and potential sessions as well so the idea about Beckman is it's
all about collaboration. And so the one mail room and the one cafe on the first floor here
is a way for people to come together and run into each other and have those kind of serendipitous
collaboration experiences. When Beckman was founded, the research agenda of this building
was the study of intelligence which included both natural biological intelligence as well as silicon
or artificial intelligence that is similar to what we still do today in terms of our three research
themes of intelligent systems, molecular science and engineering, and integrative imaging. One of
the newest things that we've done to the building is we've built this new little museum here,
which is in honor of magnetic resonance imaging and this has a history even before MRI became
a fairly widespread technology in hospitals and care settings. Paul Lauterbur was well known for
his work on magnetic resonance imaging. Um, he was hired by the University of Illinois in 1984
and he stayed here until his death in 2007. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in physiology and
medicine for his work on MRI. And this exhibit is showcasing the first two human MRI machines.
And these are the actual machines that were found by us in a storage locker in Urbana
that we have built them back up here to show of something very similar to the original settings.
We're very proud of the University of Illinois's historic contributions to the field of
nuclear magnetic resonance research and magnetic resonance imaging. And these other displays around
the room will tell you more about the history the people and the technological advances of that.
We also have over here in this case, a copy of Paul Lauterbur's uh Nobel Prize
itself. Okay so let's go ahead and head upstairs to take a
look out of the fifth-floor tower room and see a great view of the Beckman quad.
So Beckman Institute was built for collaboration and there's a number of features that we'll see
as we go through our tour. We have lots of meeting rooms because we want to bring people together and
support all that interdisciplinary collaboration. So here on the fifth-floor, in addition to a
seminar room over here on the left, I'll show you the tower room that we have over here.
So all the floors are kind of designed the same way. You come off the elevator,
you go around a pod structure and then you have different labs and offices on this office side.
This right here is the visualization lab. This is one of the core facilities of the
Beckman institute that includes, as you can see, computers that support image processing software.
And there's always a beautiful walkway to the tower room that you can see here.
So uh up here on the fifth-floor tower room, you can see we have a great view of the Beckman quad.
On the left we have our neighbors of the coordinate sciences lab, hydro systems lab,
and digital computer lab on the left and on the right, we have the new electrical
computer engineering building and the micro nano technology lab and the old Kenny Gym on the end
there. And the building we're looking at straight down the quad is the granger engineering library.
The architect of this building, the Smith Group, is also the same architectural firm
that built the new modern building next door in the electrical and computer engineering building.
Here of course we have our poster printers. I do think of each set of offices in Beckman
as a neighborhood and between the offices there is large spaces that are suitable for
setting up collaborative spaces. That's what we're going to see next on the fourth floor.
This is the Bio-photonics imaging lab so this is where the magic happens in
terms of folks working on the next generation of Bio-atomic
imaging technologies. And as you can see here, this group has published a lot of
great research in a variety of journals and they have some examples of their publications here.
And this is one of our newer neighborhoods. This is the administrative offices for the
cancer center at Illinois. The cancer center initially was a cancer center research community
that was incubated here at Beckman and now it has the status of an institute
that's at the same level of Beckman and eventually they'll get their own building
but for now, the director and his staff are all here in this neighborhood of Beckman.
So now let's go downstairs and I'll show you another key collaboration neighborhood of Beckman
So the fourth-floor tends to be imaging research and the third-floor tends to be molecular science
and engineering research. Welcome to one of the founding neighborhoods of Beckman. This is,
as you can see on the sign there, the theoretical and computational biophysics group or TCB.
They have been a group within Beckman ever since the building was built. The TCB group is
world famous for their research on computational molecular dynamics simulations, including their
main product which is NAMD, which stands for not another molecular dynamic simulation
and the visual molecular dynamics software that goes with that. There are offices for faculty,
students, and postdocs from computer science, physics, biochemistry and other related areas
so it's a great example of interdisciplinary collaboration. As you can see here,
they have their own espresso bar and they have their own wall of journal covers,
that they've been producing for years. They've been an NIH center for macro molecular modeling
for the last 20-some years now so again, they're world famous not only for their
work on developing software but on the innovations they made in understanding
molecular dynamics processes. One of the most famous covers is this one right here this is
from the journal nature in 2013. This is their computational model of the HIV capsid, the protein
shell that surrounds the HIV virus, so they were the people that figured out how to model that.
So that's one of the most famous outcomes of this research. And as you can see because of
their highly computational work, they have these giant monitors for everybody because
most of the time people are working on very detailed atomic scale models of
molecular processes and so they need its very large visualization palette to do that with.
So let's go across the hall now to the laboratory side. One of the other features of Beckman is that
in between the laboratory and the office wings, we have these little areas for people. This is
an example of a very nice little area where you have your whiteboard table and chair and also
a great view of the atrium below and again this is you know just a beautiful building to be in.
So these are the dry labs in which the research here is mostly related to lasers and optical
imaging. So we have a quantitative light imaging laboratory center for optical molecular imaging
and that's a special laboratory right here and uh other labs on this side include a variety of
things related to imaging and molecular science and engineering. Soon we'll get to sort of the
crossing point where we go into wet labs. And on this floor, we have wet labs related to chemistry
and we also have a fish lab which we'll take a look at the fish tank right up here. We have just
sort of a display tank here a variety of different kinds of fish and actually within the lab there's
um there's actually a focus on clownfish, which is the same kind of fish as Finding Nemo,
and looking at a variety of factors related to behavior and the neurobiology of clownfish.
And we have more YouTube videos about this on our Beckman institute YouTube channel
so now let's go downstairs and take a look at some of our core facilities.
So welcome to the basement and right away we will come down this main hallway here
to visit the microscopy suite. So again, this is one of the core facilities of Beckman and it's
managed by Scott Robinson with Kate, Dianwen and Leilei Yin who work with students, usually with
students directly on imaging their samples so we have kind of one of every sort of microscope
that you can think of in our microscopy suite, so let's just take a quick look to see what we have.
We have a prep lab area for people to use. We have a fluorescent microscope over here
and hi Scott. And this is Scott Robinson who is the manager of the microscopy speech
and he has a wonderful new machine here which is our new scanning transmission electron microscope
so Scott, would you like to tell about this machine? Okay, this is a brand new to us scanning
transmission electron microscope. Presently we're working with somebody who wants to look
at wheat leaves and we can look at cross sections 90 nanometers thick of those leaves. What we have
in here is this is a high-pressure freezing setup, stereology workstation, our inspection microscope
with darkfield in it. This is an atomic force microscope. The atomic force microscope allows
us to see things that are on the order of atoms. This is the environmental scanning electron
microscope. This is what we use for bug scope. Alrighty so let's go over here to the Viz labs
photography studio. This room has a number of resources for photography. 100 Megapixel camera,
um over here we have a 2 million frame per second camera that's used for all kinds of
really interesting biological processes and then this machine right here is a 3D scanner and the
physically biggest project we ever did with this scanner is a virtual alma mater that was done
as a project several years ago as the real alma mater statue was being restored in a conservatory
studio in Chicago. She wasn't going to be ready to be here for transit ceremonies that year
so the campus decided that we wanted a virtual alma app for smartphones so you can still take
a picture of your graduate of your graduating student near the statute. So Travis Ross,
the manager of the Viz lab, took this 3d scanner up to Chicago and spent a few days scanning this
giant 18-foot statue and collected more than four billion data points of imaging data from it,
which we then handed over to NCSA to reduce and to make into an app. So, we're very proud of this bit
of history that we were part of for the public affairs group at the University of Illinois.
So, let's go ahead and walk down the hall to see now the biomedical pitching center.
Welcome to the control room of the uh one of our 3T uh CMX prism machines. This is the control room
where it is safe to be and here we have not only the workstation that we use to run the scanner,
we also have some other specialized equipment so normally what happens is the technician who
is running the machine is sitting right here and he or she is setting up all the scans we're going
to do. Now they have this microphone so they can talk to the human subject who is in there.
And that is the shielded room where the actual machine is so if you look in there,
you'll see that we have a big Siemens uh Prisma machine that's a three tesla field strength
MRI scanner um so it's the same kind of technology you would see in a hospital although,
our setup is also meant for research. Another cool thing that we have is this box over here.
This is a resounding box and this is a machine that controls air flow through this plastic tube
to a little pillow that was would be behind your head in the scanner and that's how we
do MR elastography studies so elastography is the study of tissue stiffness or how elastic coercive
tissue is so here we use that little pillow to put it behind your head and we can use
it to measure the tissue stiffness of parts of your brain. Let's keep going.
So now we're going to go all the way to the other side of the building where we have our newest
magnets, it is a roofer system, it's a 9.4 tesla field stream which is pretty
high and it is a small 30 centimeter board that's meant for animals.
In here there is the actual uh Bricker MRI scanner. You can see that it's much smaller and
the things you can slide in there are going to be you know much smaller but it has much better wheel
strength and so you can hear me really great images, a very high clarity and small people
so as I said we're looking forward to having lots of really interesting images done.
So I'd like to thank you for joining me today on this tour of the Beckman Institute.
Please come back any time to enjoy our cafe attend a research event and please follow
us on social media; YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you so much, bye-bye.