Facility Suppport: Phase Two of a NSF/Boston University partnership ensuring long-term technician support for the BU TIMS Facility

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This award extends an NSF/Boston University (BU) partnership to ensure technician support for the BU TIMS Facility in the Department of Earth Sciences. The award provides two years of funding for the BU TIMS Facility Manager after which time Boston University will guarantee continuation of technical support for the productive lifetime of the Facility. The Facility includes a Triton TIMS (Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer), a New Wave MicroMill device, and a newly renovated 1000 ft2 clean lab including 300 ft2 of brand new space explicitly designed for ultra-clean TIMS related sample preparation. We specialize in the preparation and analysis of very small samples for isotopic analysis, in particular for Neodymium and Strontium. The TIMS Facility is at the heart of geochemical research in the Department of Earth Sciences supporting the four BU PIs' NSF-funded research spanning tectonics and metamorphism, igneous and mantle processes, weathering and earth surface processes, geochemical paleoceanography, and paleoclimatology. As an open regional facility for isotopic analysis, the TIMS Facility draws a very large external userbase from the geochemical community. Almost 50% of the on-site userbase is external to Boston University (from 10 other institutions thusfar), and involves predominantly NSF-funded research projects. In addition, the technical support position enables hands-on training in TIMS isotope geochemical analysis for a significant number of graduate and undergraduate students. Over 50% of the users have been students (graduate and undergraduate), and a major part of the technician?s efforts have gone into student training. Thus, the technician enables us to stay true to our mission of sustaining a research lab of excellence, while training students as the next generation of isotope geochemists. Through our website, conference presentations, and publications we actively advertise the availability of the lab and seek to share its capabilities and methodologies with the broader geochemical community.