Dr. Liu started his position as TEMPR Facility Manager on March 15th, 2019, to lead the initiative to set up the cross-disciplinary and collaborative materials characterization laboratory with capabilities of measuring thermal, elemental, mechanical, physical, and rheological (TEMPR) properties of materials in a diverse variety of research and application fields. Dr. Liu advises and collaborates in academic and industrial projects. His areas of research interests include organic materials and semiconductors, functional composite materials, and flexible integrated electronics.
TEMPR Facility was established in July 2019, and it is a world-class shared core facility for the analysis of bulk soft and hard materials across disciplines. The facility serves both on-campus users and researchers from other research institutions and local industry. The facility currently houses a suite of state-of-the-art characterization instruments. The portfolio includes thermal analysis instruments (DSC 2500, DSC Q2000, DSC Polyma, TGA Libra, TGA Q500, STA-QMS-FTIR), elemental analysis instruments (CHNS/O, LA-ICP-MS), mechanical analysis instrument (DMA Q800 and Instron 3365), physical analysis instruments (3Flex, AccuPyc, and APC-MALS-RI), and a rheological analysis instrument (DHR-2), summing up to a total of 14 instruments.
Since TEMPR’s opening in mid-2019, Dr. Liu has been the core contact in operating and management of the TEMPR facility, serving all users with timely response and thorough tutorials of each aspect of technical questions. Dr. Liu has earned great reviews and respects from users during the past two and a half years in this position. On top of his job duties in helping everyone in need around the lab, Dr. Liu participated actively in research activities and public services within IMRI and across the campus.
Research and Creative Work
The job duties as a lab manager switch the focus of active research projects and ideas to smoothly maintaining lab operations and assisting users with all kinds of research needs. Dr. Liu has adapted to his new role very quickly thanks to his experience as a lab manager in UC Santa Barbara as well as management role during his time in two separate startup companies. Dr. Liu has been participating in discussing project ideas and to develop research collaboration opportunities with research groups in the Schools of Engineering, Physical Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Medicine. As an example, Dr. Liu proposed the use of ICP-MS technique to a number of biomedical research projects from the School of Medicine, including studies of platinum uptake in cancer cells and residual metals analysis in e-cigarettes. Dr. Liu provided one letter of support to an NIH grant application from the School of Medicine and three letters of support to small business grant applications from SBIR, EPA, and USDA. One of the small business grants from EPA was awarded in 2022. Dr. Liu had offered three in-person presentations to research groups within the Schools of Engineering and Physical Sciences and three virtual presentation and discussions to research group in the School of Medicine, CSU Long Beach, and UC Riverside. Dr. Liu also created slides material in order to promote TEMPR facility and educate potential users about TEMPR’s capabilities and distributed it to many research groups inside and outside of UCI. Dr. Liu also forged close collaboration with the Center for Isotope Tracers in Earth Science (CITIE) within the School of Physical Sciences led by Prof. Kathleen Johnson in providing analysis service and serve the local research community.
Dr. Liu organized three onsite training courses and instrument demonstrations including (1) a two-day 3Flex onsite training course with Micromeritics (09/04/2019-09/05/2019) with 6 participants from the Schools of Engineering and Physical Sciences; (2) a nano-indenter demonstration with Optics11 on 01/17/2020 with more than 20 participants; (3) a two-day ICP-MS onsite training course with ThermoFisher Scientific (02/11/2020-02/12/2020) with 30 participants from UCI Schools of Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Medicine. In addition to running the TEMPR Facility and serving users, Dr. Liu forged research collaborations with groups at UCLA and Jilin University. The recent results are published in Nanophotonics (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2020-0214) with Dr. Liu serving as co-first author.
Professional Competency and Activity
Shortly after the opening of TEMPR facility to the public, Dr. Liu designed and implemented a new training request sign-up system, streamlined the sign-up process with a much more friendly user interface, and received wide acceptance and acknowledgement from users. this largely lowered the burden from new users in getting access to the facility for their benefit. Dr. Liu has also employed Google Drive system to standardize data management as well as data sharing across TEMPR Facility which provides users with cloud access to knowledge base, standard operating procedures, and other relevant references for each instrument. Since most techniques in TEMPR facility require substantial knowledgebase to understand or even operate the instruments, Dr. Liu has been maintaining an active database of technical documents and presentations related to the thermal, elemental, mechanical, physical, and rheological properties of materials, which are either originally created or secured through personal contacts with technology companies and individuals.
Dr. Liu recruited four student lab assistants – three current UCI graduate students and one postdoctoral researcher from the Schools of Engineering and Physical Sciences – to assist users with thermal, elemental, mechanical, and physical property characterization, respectively. These four lab assistants contribute to user engagement, project services, problem-solving, and instrument maintenance.
TEMPR has been operated for two years during the review periods plus a half year in 2021. During the first year of operation, 92 unique users from UCI, other universities, and industry have been trained to use one or more TEMPR instruments. In addition, Dr. Liu has coordinated staff-run experiments for 20 researchers with the lab assistants with 13 researchers not trained on TEMPR instruments which makes the total number of users who made use of TEMPR is 105. The second year, TEMPR added 41 additional unique users and 16 return users. Staff-run projects were performed for 19 researchers in which 14 are not trained which makes the total number of people who made use of TEMPR in its second year is 71. the total number of users added per year per instrument is detailed in Table 1.
The first year of operating TEMPR has achieved a total of 4510 hours of instrument use and $47,532.5 in recharge income, while user-run experiments account for 4,351.5 among these hours and 77.2% of the income. TEMPR had a total of 7,404 hours of instrument use and $84,329 in recharge income in its second year of operation, a 64% increase in usage hours and a 77% increase in recharge income, respectively, compared to year 1. User-run experiments accounted for 6,829 of these hours and 74.7% of the income during year 2.
Table 1. Number of New Users added Per Year Per Instrument
| Number of New Users | ||||
| Instrument | 07/2019-06/2020 (Year 1) | 07/2020-06/2021 (Year 2) | 07/2021-01/2022 (7 months) | |
| DSC 2500 | 14 | 9 | 7 | |
| DSC Q2000 | 8 | 2 | 1 | |
| DSC Polyma | 8 | 0 | 2 | |
| TGA Libra | 11 | 6 | 3 | |
| TGA Q500 | 11 | 4 | 2 | |
| STA-QMS-FTIR | 35 | 6 | 7 | |
| FlashSmart | 6 | 3 | 4 | |
| ICP-MS | 18 | 16 | 4 | |
| LA-ICP-MS | 0 | 12 | 2 | |
| DMA Q800 | 24 | 8 | 13 | |
| Instron | 6 | 8 | 8 | |
| APC-MALS-RI | 16 | 3 | 6 | |
| 3Flex | 16 | 11 | 5 | |
| DHR-2 Rheometer | 15 | 10 | 9 | |
| AccuPyc | 5 | 0 | 2 | |
Staff-run project service is a central effort in attracting potential users from local research institutions and companies. In sum, 27 projects in year 1 (2 projects done by two lab assistants), 49 projects in year 2 (5 projects done by one lab assistant), and 32 projects for the 6 months in year 3 were carried out in a timely manner coordinated by Dr. Liu and lab assistants. These staff-run experiments accounted for the 158.5 hours and 22.8% of the income during the first year, while 575 hours and 25.3% of the income were recorded for year 2, an increase of over 260% in staff hours and over 95% in recharge income as compared with year 1.
In particular, usage hours and recharge incomes for the major instruments in TEMPR are summarized below. During the first year of operation, STA-QMS-FTIR recorded 1,936.5 hours (42.9% of total TEMPR usage hours), representing $17,535 in recharge income (36.9% of total income). The second, third, fourth, and fifth most used instruments are the 3Flex (658.5 hours, 14.6% of total TEMPR usage hours; $3,925, 8.3% of total income), the Q800 DMA (539.5 hours, 12% of total usage hours; $4,695.5, 9.9% of total income), the DSC 2500 (314 hours, 7.0% of total usage hours; $2,685, 5.6% of total income), the ICP-MS (217.5 hours, 4.8% of total usage hours; $4576.5, 9.6% of total income) respectively. The other nine instruments represent a combined 18.7% of total usage hours and 29.7% of total income. Going into the second year, STA-QMS-FTIR was used for 2,933 hours (39.6% of total TEMPR usage hours), representing $28,893 in recharge income (34.3% of total income). The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth most used instruments are the 3Flex (1,638 hours, 22.1% of total TEMPR usage hours; $12,574, 14.9% of total income), the ICP-MS (602 hours, 8.1% of total usage hours; $19,616, 23.3% of total income), the Q800 DMA (588 hours, 7.9% of total usage hours; $3,839, 4.6% of total income), the DSC 2500 (413 hours, 5.6% of total usage hours; $6,210, 7.4% of total income) and TGA Libra (413 hours, 5.6% of total usage hours; $2,864, 3.4% of total income), respectively. The other eight instruments represent a combined 11.1% of total usage hours and 12.1% of total income.
With comparison between year 2 and year 1 during the short time period of TEMPR operations, it is foreseeable that the future perspective is rapidly ramping up, especially based on the fact that TEMPR offers unique technical aspects across a large geographical area with professional staff support.
University and Public Service
In addition to his job duties, Dr. Liu has been researching on competitive facilities management systems with the aim of improving working efficiency as well as expanding management capacity from the existing system. Dr. Liu has also been actively involved in event organization for IMRI. He has been part of the coordination committee for organizing ISAMS-2, ISAMS-3, and ISAMS-4 on a yearly basis. Dr. Liu designed and deployed the entire IMRI (http://imri.uci.edu) and MRSEC (http://ccam.uci.edu) websites from scratch during the COVID period and is served as the main contact in maintaining and improving the websites.
