Clemson University

The proposed activities will occur in the Biosystem Research Complex (BRC), Life Sciences Building (LSB), Rhodes Hall, Earle Hall, or the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR).

The BRC (108,000 sq. ft.) at CU is a state-of-the-art biotechnology facility with emergency backup power, a dedicated data center, shared core facilities, and investigator laboratories. Faculty from multiple departments and colleges are housed together, share equipment, communicate daily, and cross-train graduate students. Dr. Harcum has 1450 sq. ft. of high quality laboratory space dedicated to bioreactor controls and cell culture optimization. The core facilities in BRC include genomics and genome sequencing, bioinformatics and computational biology (Dr. Saski is the Director), a Proteomics Facility, and the Multi-User Analytical Laboratory (MUAL) with Dr. Tharayil as the director. MUAL is a state of the art mass spectrometry facilty with a Orbitrap Fusion Tribrid mass spectrometer. Drs. Groff and Wang have general-use laboratory in Riggs Hall and wet-laboratory space in Rhodes Hall, which also houses the majority of Bioengineering.

The LSB is a 100,000-square-foot facility that has LEED gold status. Researchers housed in the facility represent the disciplines of microbiology, biochemistry, food safety and genetics. The LSB facility encourages collaboration, offers state-of-the-art technology with it open suite laboratory design. The Clemson Light Imaging Facility (CLIF) is located in LSB. CLIF has numerous state of the art light microscopes, including spectral imaging confocal laser scanning systems, super resolution microscopes, TIRF laser systems, transmission and episcopic DIC, epifluorescence and brightfield microscopes, and high speed microscopes. TEM and SEM capabilities are located nearby in Pendleton, SC. A “palmetto cluster” with 38.2 TF peak performance using 512 nodes; 8 cores per node; 12 GB/node; and 80 GB disk/node is available for bioinformatics and modeling work. This system also contains 120 TB of large-scale, high performance disk storage and is housed at Clemson’s Information Technology Center in a 24/7 monitored environment with proper power, cooling and physical security. Additionally CUGL maintains a 32‐node 1GHz dual processor 1GM RAM Linux cluster and a 32‐node 2.3GHz dual processor 2GB RAM Apple cluster in BRC. The CU-ICAR Manufacturing Systems Research Laboratory is a 90,000-sq. ft. research center-housing faculty dedicated to manufacturing and systems integration research. The laboratory is constructed with high-speed wireless networking and has available to the project real-time flexible control hardware and software for controller prototyping, web-based control testing, and sensor monitoring research. Dr. Mears has 1000 sq. ft. of high quality laboratory space within CU-ICAR. These unique and highly specialized facilities that exist at CU offer unprecedented opportunity to impact AMBIC in a positive way and provide CU a special role within the overall AMBIC framework.