Facilities celebrated the successful completion of the Oyster Point (OP) Point Freezer Infrastructure Project last month, which was finished ahead of schedule.
The core of this project was installing new electrical and mechanical infrastructure, including Automatic Transfer Switches (ATS), to support an additional 60 freezers.
With the Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) successfully in place, freezers can switch from normal to emergency power within four seconds of losing the normal power source. This helps protect invaluable research from being compromised in the event of a power outage.
"While the switch itself is fast, it represents countless hours of painstaking effort from the facilities team and our contractors," Project Manager Alfredo Gonzalez said.
This project would not have been possible without the contributions of Facilities Manager Mary Anne Hallacy, Construction Manager James Beatty, and Supply Chain Operations Manager Charles Sabia, who coordinated to develop and finalize the project.
"The phase 2 expansion will directly support new opportunities for storage of biospecimens for the UCSF laboratory community," Sabia said. "I am especially thankful for our facility to have the opportunity to support our research community."
The Director of the Biospecimen Processing Lab (BSPL), Aras Mattis, M.D., PHD, was grateful to the team and contractors for the excellent work provided.
"The work provides a critical expansion of much-needed additional freezer space that is used by all researchers across campus, including translational and basic science, to store precious biological samples. It also provides departments with the ability to recruit additional researchers to UCSF. Expansion of the freezer farm has allowed UCSF to get private donor grants to support additional projects, including the Liver Center BioBank," Mattis said.
For Gonzalez, the project completion is an accomplishment that everyone involved should be proud of.
"Projects like this make a significant, direct impact on our research community—and it's precisely why we're here," Gonzalez said.