[3dem] Very Vague Question

[Marcus FISLAGE]

Hi Paul,

I think an important aspect is what type of customer do you serve industrial or academics.
For your academic users I would not recommend that the facility is doing the processing for the users. We invested heavily in training of our local base with seminars and hands on support. This hands-on support can be quite a lot in the beginning as your users will make many dumb mistakes and do not see what went wrong. In that early period a dedicated staff scientist can be very helpful. And for that you probably need someone with post-doc level skills. A technical staff could do the job but may need significant training first,bringing you back to square one. For processing training of your academic users, you can also send them on many of the professional workshops organized throughout the country. From there on the knowledge should normally start to propagate withing the local groups.
What I found very helpful is to take over the maintenance of the computing infratsructure for the academic groups. We host all the group owned GPU stations (they don;t want to share) and provide them at the same time with secure long and short term data storage as well as software packages hosted by us that are available to all users. Therfore the users only have to learn how to use the software, not how to maintain a system. Depending on the size of the user base this can be done by a half or full FTE. It is very helpful if that IT FTE has knowledge about cryoEM, so the person can translate computer-user/user-computer.

The more industrial clients you have the more a dedicated staff and in house processing can be very useful. Like that you can easily counter-finance the computing person for the academic groups which would otherwise complain about the costs. However, I also have met several industrial people that just want data. So here it is very important I think to listen to your industrial user base. Providing them with processing option could be a good way of tying them to you, but it is hard/important to define what a successull result in processing data is.

Cheers
Marcus



______________________________________

Dr. Marcus Fislage


Upcoming days out of office:

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EM Manager

BECM
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From: 3dem <3dem-bounces at ncmir.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Chipman,Paul via 3dem <3dem at ncmir.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 3:45 PM
To: 3dem at ncmir.ucsd.edu <3dem at ncmir.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [3dem] Very Vague Question


Hi All,



We recently acquired a TFS Glacios and have started to pump out large amounts of data.  Many of our customers are completely unfamiliar with image processing.  I’m interested to hear how any other core facilities or similar have dealt with this issue.  Since we are an expected revenue neutral core I’m a bit challenged on how to best help our users.  Should we hire someone to deal with processing? What would be an expected salary? Post doc?  We have a bioinformatics core that might be helpful as well or positioned to have a joint appointment.  Just looking for thoughts.



Best,

Paul
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