From the Director
A lot of things have been going on at RIRC over the past few months, mostly good but some not so good and the not so good has been occupying a lot of our time during the early fall.
To get the not so good out of the way first, on September 21 our building (the Gillespie Neuroscience Research Facility) experienced a disastrous flood.This was the result of a burst cold water pipe that goes into the air conditioning units on the roof. The pipe is the size of a fire hose, and water sprayed out at a rate of hundreds of gallons a minute, coming down throughout the building. For those of you who have visited our center, imagine a waterfall coming down from the 3-story high ceiling in the foyer. Fortunately, this happened during the day (although on a weekend) and people were working in the lab and quickly reported the flood. Still, it took time to shut the water off, and so our building experienced major damage, mostly in the form of soaking sheet rock and wood trim. Fortunately, graduate student Jen Yonan was working in our labs and was able to cover sensitive equipment so damage was minimal. Even more fortunately, the hundreds of mice and rats we have in our colony were OK.
The building was completely closed for several days to assess whether it was safe to return due to water in electrical systems. The university contracted with a disaster response team who immediately began the job of repairing the damage, and they have been wonderful in cooperating with us so that we were able to continue to do critical research in the lab. As of mid-November, we have been able to return to our offices after replacing sheet rock and carpet, and repair work in the labs is nearly complete although a lot still needs to be done on the upper floors of the building, which suffered even more severe damage than we did. It has been a mess to say the least, but operations are recovering and we hope to have things back mostly to normal by the first of the year.
Now on to the good things:
- Our research programs have been going extraordinarily well!
- New faculty have joined the RIRC and one of our former senior investigators has returned to UCI (Tom Lane)
- New research programs have been launched (see Anatomy 101)
- New NIH grants have been awarded, documenting the cutting edge nature of our research programs
- We hosted a spectacular symposium/workshop honoring Dr. Zhigang He as the 20th recipient of the Reeve-Irvine Research Medal
More on all these things in the articles throughout our fall newsletter.
