Winning the Cold War With Room Temperature Biological Sample Storage
Susan Kulakowski, Stanford University
Stanford University has completed a pilot project to evaluate an innovative technology that promises to achieve sustainability goals by reducing laboratory energy consumption (along with associated costs and greenhouse gas emissions), optimizing the use of valuable laboratory space, and better protecting priceless biological samples in the event of an earthquake or other disaster. Using a stabilization technology developed by Biomatrica®, biological samples such as DNA and RNA can be safely protected and stored at ambient (room) temperature as opposed to traditional storage in ultra-cold freezers. This poster will discuss the results of the four-month project, which engaged 12 research laboratories to assess the number of samples that could be moved from freezers to ambient temperature storage, validate the Biomatrica technology, actually transfer 70,000 samples from freezer storage to room temperature storage, and extrapolate the potential benefits to the entire Stanford University campus over 10 years. Adoption of this technology for the existing sample collection alone offers potential to reduce the university's annual electricity use by nearly 2 million kilowatt-hours and chilled water consumption by more than 300,000 ton-hours (about 2 percent and 0.5 percent of the campus total, respectively), thereby avoiding more than 800 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Such an investment in new sample storage technology could pay for itself within two years.
Biography:
Susan Kulakowski leads and coordinates activities to reduce demand for energy at Stanford University. She and her team manage major and minor energy retrofit programs, an electricity conservation incentive program, the annual winter break energy curtailment, and sustainable information technology initiatives. Ms. Kulakowski also seeks out and evaluates promising technologies, such as ambient temperature biological sample storage. Prior to rejoining the University in 2001, Ms. Kulakowski was a project manager with Energy Solutions, where she designed and administered nonresidential energy efficiency programs. She has a Bachelor of Arts in public policy from Stanford and earned her Master of Science from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley.