Core Laboratories
Director of Core Laboratories & Women’s Board Associate Curator of Herpetology
About the Core Labs
The Field Museum has five Core Labs, part of the Negaunee Integrative Research Center. Core Labs are those that are not specific to one person’s research or one group of scientists but that serve many different types of research and are open for use by all Field Museum scientists and their collaborators. These labs produce cutting-edge research, with two of them being brand new facilities. The current Core Lab Group includes the following laboratories:
A state-of-the-art facility for computed tomography (3D) imaging of objects from all collections areas.
Uses a focused beam of electrons to take high resolution images and compositional maps of surfaces of biological, geological and archeological samples.
An inter-departmental, multi-user core facility dedicated to genetic analysis and preservation of the world's biodiversity.
A space dedicated to the study of degraded and low DNA yield samples such as environmental and ancient DNA.
The EAF contains instrumentation including a mass spectrometer and lasers that allows for the rapid compositional analysis, in a minimally or non-destructive manner, of artifacts collected during archaeological excavations and field work conducted by Field Museum curators and colleagues from other institutions.