Division Facilities
The Division of Surgical Research at Rhode Island Hospital occupies 16,783
square feet of contiguous space including 11,807 square feet of laboratory
space. The remaining space contains offices for the investigators and trainees,
conference room/library, and sterilization facility. The Division functions
under an “open laboratory” basis with equipment freely shared
among investigators. Most laboratories not on the Rhode Island Hospital campus
are located on the Brown Campus and served by a shuttle bus.
Resources available to Brown University trainees
In addition to the diverse departmental and institutional resources available to the training program through Brown Medical School, there is the local scientific community, composed of individuals from this center as well as from the VA and Memorial hospitals. This provides trainees access to a truly unique community of scholars. The breadth of informal and formal educational interactions with scientists in these affiliated institutions markedly enhances the opportunities available to trainees.
As a Brown University trainee, participants in the program also have full access to the core facilities at Brown University as well as those at Rhode Island Hospital. Both institutions are NIH-supported Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE). Brown University is a designated COBRE Center for Genetics and Genomics, which includes facilities for the use and analysis of Affymetrix Gene Chip Arrays and the construction of transgenic mice.
Rhode Island Hospital is also a COBRE Center for Proteomics and Molecular Pathology (PI: Douglas Hixson, Ph.D.) and includes technician-supported facilities for mass spectroscopy, protein chip analysis, HPLC and gel electrophoresis-based proteomics technologies. The Molecular Pathology core facility includes a Stratagene Mx4000 Multiplex Quantitative PCR System for conducting "real-time" PCR, an Arcturus Engineering laser capture microdissection system with microscope and fluorescence capabilities, tissue-array capabilities and a frozen tissue/paraffin-embedded bank of human, mouse and rat tissues.
Rhode Island Hospital maintains a Core Research Facility and a COBRE Center for Cancer Research which include flow cytometry, scanning and transmission electron microscopy with specimen embedding and sectioning, full histological services including paraffin embedding, sectioning and staining, and inverted and upright confocal microscopes with state-of-the-art image analysis.
Library access is provided by the Rhode Island Hospital and Brown University Science Libraries and by the Brown University on-line electronic library resources.
