Robin is a professional engineer and physicist who, 25 years ago, made a sharp turn from semiconductors into genomics. His primary focus since then has been laboratory automation and the BCGSC Instrumentation Group has been on the forefront of automating nucleic acid purification and library construction since the beginning of the NGS era. This primarily means developing methods on commercial liquid handlers, but Dr Coope’s team also develops novel hardware and informatics driven workflows. The team has also worked on a number of medical devices in radiotherapy, respirology and orthopaedics.
While most of the Instrumentation Group’s work is internal to BCGSC, it also does method developed for Hamilton robots in other local labs, and does contract engineering projects for local collaborators for both lab applications and early stage medical device prototyping.
