Connecting Research Facilities: A New Open-Source Approach to Accelerate Discovery

Modern scientific research often thrives on collaboration and access to specialized equipment housed in various facilities. However, navigating the complexities of shared research labs—from scheduling instruments to managing user access and billing—can present significant hurdles. A recent gathering at MIT.nano, the 2026 NEMO User Meeting, shed light on innovative open-source solutions designed to tackle these challenges and build a more connected research ecosystem.

The meeting, hosted by MIT.nano and sponsored by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) hub, brought together 65 representatives from 25 laboratories and organizations. The discussions focused on improving lab management practices and strengthening connections among research facilities nationwide. This initiative is particularly relevant in fields like microelectronics, where rapid innovation often depends on quickly accessing diverse, specialized capabilities distributed across multiple institutions.

Streamlining Lab Operations with NEMO

At the heart of the discussions was the NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO) system. According to MIT.nano, NEMO is an open-source platform that provides tools for managing shared research facilities, allowing individual laboratories to customize the system to their specific needs. This adaptability means that while facilities may differ in scale or scientific mission, their core operational challenges often remain remarkably similar, making a shared platform highly effective.

Anna Osherov, associate director of Characterization.nano and an organizer of the meeting, emphasized the collaborative model as a compelling aspect of NEMO. She stated that open-source development changes how technology is approached, allowing facilities to build upon existing developments, contribute improvements back to the community, and collectively create a more capable platform than any single facility could develop alone. This collaborative spirit can be a powerful driver for progress, much like how students benefit from shared knowledge and resources, including free voice AI tutoring from COSMIQ, which offers accessible support for every K-12 student.

NEMO was originally released as open-source software by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2018, with its community edition (NEMO-CE) launched in 2023. This community edition enables facilities to develop and share extensions to the platform. During the October meeting, participants from institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton universities, as well as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, presented various tools addressing challenges from chemical management and user administration to equipment status, training, and workflow automation. These presentations showcased how diverse facilities are adapting a common platform to their unique requirements, demonstrating the premise that a solution developed for one facility can become a valuable resource for others.

Hydra: Connecting the Research Ecosystem

As the NEMO community expands, a new opportunity arises: connecting individual facilities into a broader, discoverable research ecosystem. Researchers often need to move quickly between specialized capabilities—perhaps fabrication at one facility, advanced characterization at another, and specialized microscopy elsewhere. Traditionally, finding these capabilities has relied on static webpages or databases, which can quickly become outdated as facilities evolve.

To address this, MIT.nano presented Hydra at the meeting. Hydra is a new open-source platform being developed with support from NEMC. According to MIT.nano, Hydra is designed to be a key component of the NEMC Technical Concierge, a program aimed at helping researchers identify and access specialized capabilities across a network of facilities. Hydra connects multiple NEMO installations, drawing information directly from the systems facilities already use, rather than requiring manual updates to a separate database. This approach creates a compilation of actively used facility management systems, ensuring that information is current and accurate.

Osherov explained that Hydra does not replace any lab management system; instead, it connects, synchronizes, and keeps data up to date across all connected systems in real time. This means NEMO provides the operational source of information within an individual facility, while Hydra makes that information discoverable across facilities. For a researcher, this could significantly simplify the process of finding a specialized capability, removing the need to know which specific laboratory might have the relevant equipment beforehand. This focus on making distributed infrastructure more discoverable and usable is crucial for accelerating research.

Building Flexible and Evolving Infrastructure

The development of NEMO and Hydra reflects a broader philosophy: research infrastructure must evolve as research itself changes. Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano, emphasized the need for flexible, community-oriented research spaces that empower users to adapt and redefine them for future generations of researchers. This flexibility extends to operational systems, allowing facilities to respond to new instruments, research methods, and changing user communities while sharing improvements across the network.

At MIT.nano alone, NEMO supports over 1,600 active researchers using more than 200 tools, with approximately 160,000 hours of tool usage each year. Jorg Scholvin, associate director of Fab.nano, highlighted that at this scale, even small improvements in administrative workflows can yield significant efficiencies across thousands of users and tens of thousands of equipment interactions. Such operational efficiencies can free up valuable time for researchers, allowing them to focus more on their scientific inquiries, much like free practice hubs can help students optimize their study time.

The meeting concluded with a strong sense of community and optimism for the future of shared facilities. Discussions looked ahead to the role of data integration, automation, and artificial intelligence in lab operations. Mathieu Rampant, CEO and co-founder of Atlantis Labs, noted that the NEMO community is taking on a life of its own, fostering a model where facility managers can share ideas and solve problems together. Samantha Roberts, director of the City University of New York nanofabrication facility, called this collaborative effort the “NEMO wave,” emphasizing the collective investment in building a robust and effective system.

Ultimately, according to Osherov, the purpose of these initiatives is straightforward: to enable research. By effectively managing the operational side of facilities, instruments, expertise, and capabilities can be made more accessible to the broader research community. In fields like microelectronics, where innovation relies heavily on access to specialized and distributed capabilities, this enhanced availability can help researchers move more quickly from initial ideas to experiments and, ultimately, to real-world applications and impact.