Operations and Maintenance Support: Surface Science Western, Western Nanofabrication and Tandetron Accelerator Facilities

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This OMSRE application aims at maintaining three facilities specialized in material science that are located, operated and maintained at Western University. Surface Science Western, the Tendetron accelerator and the Western Nanofabrication Facilities been operated at Western since 1981, 1986 and 2004, respectively. All together, they employ 16 employee in addition to their three directors (Shoesmith, Goncharova, Lagugné-Labarthet) that hold professor positions at Western. The facilities have been running with no interruption since their inception making them facilities of choice for any researcher in needs of expertise in material and surface characterization, material implantation and surface patterning. The facilities have been very successful participating to more than 400 manuscripts annually as well as patents in critical fields such as corrosion science or sensing applications. In order to maintain the numerous instruments located in these facilities at their highest operation levels, the Maintenance and Operational support for research equipment grant is critical to allow one to further promote and facilitate the access to our users by reducing the maintenance and operational costs that are presently only supported by the user-fee from the researchers using the facilities. Only three full-time employee have their salaries+benefits covered by the Faculty of Science at Western. The facilities together are therefore generating enough revenues to cover the full salaries+benefit of 13 employees from the academic user-fee and industrial contracts. This causes an important strain on our maintenance budget and prevent modernization and upgrades of some of our apparatus in reasonable time. The requested budget aims at maintaining the instrument located in the facilities and facilitating its access by limiting the operational costs. This will allow to reduce users fee, and subsequently to continue promoting our facility in a more efficient way to our local, national and international users.