About
King’s offers a range of Core Research Facilities across the Health Schools, providing access to essential technology and equipment to facilitate and enhance the research conducted by King’s scientists and external researchers.
The activities of the core facilities are overseen by the Core Facilities User Group (CORFU) which operates to provide support to these facilities, to monitor their performance, and to integrate their roles with those of Biomedical Research Centre core facilities. The group meets monthly to evaluate the quality of existing core facilities and to assess the demand for new core research services through user surveys and user proposals.
The areas overseen by CORFU can be broken down as outlined below:
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Core Research Facilities – these consist of both Major Research Facilities (MRFs) and Small Research Facilities (SRFs). These facilities provide support to staff across all the Health Schools, but are likely to be based at a single location e.g. Mass Spectrometry and Genomics Facilities at FWB, Genetics and NMR Facilities at Guy’s Campus, and Proteomics at Denmark Hill.).
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Distributed Campus Based Services – these are distributed across a number of locations/Campuses e.g. the Biological Services Unit (BSU) which is one of the four Major Research Facilities available at King’s.
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Equipment embedded within individual research groups but accessible to others for a usage charge (calculated in the same manner as for SRFs). An inventory of all such equipment available is available.
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Co-ordination of service contracts – the cost of service contracts for individual pieces of equipment can be highly expensive. One role of CORFU, is to assist in the negotiation and management of service contracts in bulk, rather than on an individual basis, thereby reducing the cost of equipment maintenance to the College.