Neural Engineering Laboratory

Facilities

News

The Neural Engineering Laboratory is located in the Long and Kimmy Nguyen Building of the Volgenau School of Engineering on the Fairfax campus. Faculty have nearby office space with administrative support, a tool/machining room, and conference room.  In addition, Dr. Peixoto maintains laboratory space at the nearby Krasnow Institute of Advanced Study on the Fairfax campus.

The Neural Engineering laboratory includes rooms 3906, 3914, and the interior room 3914C on the 3rd floor of the Engineering Building. The laboratory consists of two fully outfitted wet labs comprising 700 sq feet with chemical hoods, dedicated electrophysiology, chemical solution preparation, and electrochemistry workstations. In addition, between the two laboratories is a shared 200 sq ft cell culture facility which is fully operational. Major equipment includes an Omniplex multichannel data acquisition system (Plexon Inc), Axopatch 200 patch clamp amplifier (Axon Instruments), PatchStar Micromanipulator (Scientifica), Digidata/pCLAMP data acquisition system (Axon Instruments), PC-10 pipette puller (Narishige), CPM-2 Coating and Polishing microforge (ALA Scientific Instruments), potentiostat (Gamry), two multichannel electrochemical station (CHinstruments), dual stack CO2incubators, laminar flow biosafety cabinet, -80°C freezer, general use refrigerator, centrifuge, in vitro microelectrode array system (Multichannel Systems), three inverted microscopes equipped for fluorescence immunohistochemistry (Nikon Eclipse), phase contrast/DIC imaging for patch clamp experiments (Zeiss Axio-Observer), and a trinocular inverted microscope for cell culture use (World Precision Instruments).

For material science work, Neural Engineering Laboratory personnel make use of the Georgetown Nanoscience and Microtechnology Laboratory (GNuLab). The GNuLab is a Class 1000 cleanroom which provides access to a range of material characterization tools including a scanning electron microscope (Zeiss SUPRA55-VP) and stylus film thickness profilometer (Dektak 3030).