03 Jun Previously, during the lockdown
As a consequence of the pandemic, for the first time in its history, the Bordeaux Imaging Center, Photonic unit, has closed its door on March, the 16th, 2020. We, as engineers, were heart-broken to leave our dear users and machines, but we knew this was the best option (see https://youtu.be/DgbcO914Fp0). For all of us the first days of lockdown have been dedicated to setting up several resources to work from home. A dedicated e-lab book has been setup (https://www.elabftw.net/), and we’ve explored use of wikis to switch our user-manuals from printed material to dematerialized ones.
We kept our weekly Tuesday morning meetings alternating organizational questions of service, budget, human resources, funding projects, equipments… but also scientific meetings. We were thus able to share and discuss remotely each other’s experiences on tissue clearing and immuno-labelling of large sample, or on multi-color, multi-scale super resolution techniques and also on correlative microscopy and the benefits of cryo fixation. We contributed to share our know-how, through the French Technical Network in Microscopy (RT-MFM, http://rtmfm.cnrs.fr/). Have a look at our webinar about lattice light-sheet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYyfngGJb_4&feature=youtu.be. We’ve kept in touch with our users through our newsletter.
Our users’ requests did not slow down, and we fully have been engineering new ways to help, mainly on data analysis and papers’ finalization, using online resources. This time has also been a great opportunity to refine our knowledge, and even explore new fields. In this matter, we took great benefit of the NEUBIAS Academy (http://eubias.org/NEUBIAS/training-schools/neubias-academy-home/) and all the webinars microscopes providers have been setting up. Keeping the connection within the team while staying at home as not been an issue: we kept in touch through daily “Skype Coffee Breaks”, a moment to share both work-related information and making sure everyone was Ok.
Overall, this period has been a challenge for the team, but we have been facing it all together.
We can’t wait to be all back in the Facility, welcoming our happy (masked) users in our premises.