Montserrat de Luna joined the Parc Científic de Barcelona (PCB) in November 2001 and opened the first boxes of scientific equipment to arrive at the centre. Many years have passed, but she maintains that the work is essentially the same: ensuring that PCB users can go about their scientific work without having to worry either infrastructure and basic equipment or management, because that is taken care of by her team: 29 professionals distributed among the Common Scientific Services areas, the Animal Facility and the Radioactive Facility.

Scientific Services was one of the first to be set up when the PCB project was born, and you experienced these early years of construction first-hand. How do you remember it?

It was a chaotic period, when I was working for a community that had not yet been established, and which was already expected to grow steadily. Everything new and everything still to be done, learning a huge amount of new stuff every day. We had a big challenge in front of us: fill a building still under construction with equipment and services, while research groups arrived at the laboratories. The experience I shared with the team, with everyone pitching in, is something you can’t relive: it was a privilege to have lived through that period. The PCB saw the opportunity to be the provider of equipment and services, many of them on a self-service basis, and to offer them for a fee that could be contracted by the laboratories. This entailed the PCB managing this equipment and these services, guaranteeing uninterrupted availability, complying with specific regulations, having alternative equipment available in the event of a breakdown, carrying out preventive and corrective maintenance programmes without interrupting activity, reporting incidents, resolving them, accompanying the laboratories that joined the community, recording the state of the equipment, renewing in, foreseeing demand and monitoring use indicators and knowing the requirements of the laboratories, in terms of quality as well. In short, optimising laboratory resources and time by centralising this management.

A model that is still valid today…

Correct. That was 24 years ago and some of the decisions we made laid the groundwork for what we still offer today: sharing scientific equipment and unique facilities; providing key services, such as the Animal Facility, radioactivity research, the microbial culture service, etc., and freeing up laboratory technicians from their management, so that they can devote more time to experimental tasks and produce results.

And how did you manage to fill the building?

That was another adventure. When I joined the company, the tender for equipment had already been launched, and I remember like it was yesterday large trailers arriving, loaded with equipment: centrifuges, ultrafreezers, fume hoods, large-volume autoclaves, which weighed so much that the wheels slipped on the access ramps… It was impressive when they unloaded pallets full of crates with all that brand-new material. A unique situation for many of us: we didn’t just get one microscope delivered, as would be the case in a long-established laboratory, we received dozens, all of them high-calibre; assembly and installation in the rooms with new furniture, all brand-new… A dream for those of us who saw them arrive and made them available. We were setting up the first science park in Spain.

The PCB is currently at 100% capacity. This implies an increase in demand for scientific infrastructures. How do you adapt the services to this demand?

We analyse specific needs when we receive suggestions from users. We particularly monitor actively booked equipment, and we can anticipate changes in demand and redistribute equipment and the number of units, adapting to groups to optimise space. Behind all our decisions, there is always data analysis. When renewing equipment, we think about efficiency, performance, safety and precision. We do not consider equipment that requires servicing or that cannot be operated in self-service or shared mode.