R&D Magazine’s
2009 Laboratory of the Year
Entry Form
Completed Entries Due: February 16, 2009
Completed entries may be submitted online using the 2009 Laboratory of the Year Submission Form The entry form and supporting entry materials (other than photo CDs as described below) must be submitted as a PDF file online. You may re-create the entry form in your own word-processing program and incorporate it in your project description to meet your design needs. Read these instructions carefully as they represent a change from the entry procedure from prior years.
R&D Magazine invites entries to the 43rd international Laboratory of the Year competition. The annual competition recognizes the best new and renovated laboratories that combine all aspects of the building into a superior working environment.
Due to an increasing number of innovative laboratory renovation projects and the unique design concepts that they entail, the 2009 Laboratory of the Year competition judges will have the option of awarding a separate Renovated Laboratory of the Year Award, Adaptive Re-use Award, and/or Build-to-fit Award, along with the traditional Laboratory of the Year Award. All entries, including renovation projects, will be considered for Laboratory of the Year status, which may be given to more than one project if buildings in separate categories are deemed worthy (for instance, a new-construction LOY plus a Renovated LOY).
A new or renovated laboratory should have an appropriate site, an appealing architecture, and a functional arrangement that encourages innovation and communication between its scientists, engineers, technicians, and staff members. In addition, the facility should provide for the efficient use of energy, the safety of personnel and experiments, convenient ingress and egress for both humans (including handicapped) and materials, and for the humane treatment of any animal test subjects.
Former winning companies have received international attention and interest from potential customers.
ELIGIBILITY
This competition is for research laboratories, quality assurance/control laboratories, clinical laboratories, teaching laboratories, software development facilities, and testing and standards labs. For this competition, “laboratory” refers to any building—wing, addition, or portion of a building—that contains one or more work areas dedicated to research, development, science teaching, quality assurance, or testing and standards.
Any freestanding laboratory, major interior renovation of an existing laboratory, or laboratory as an addition to an existing building may be entered. (Projects consisting only of a small portion of a larger facility may be considered for a Special Mention award but not for a Laboratory of the Year citation.)
Laboratories completed and occupied between August 1, 2007, and December 31, 2008 may be entered.
(Note: Labs completed after July 31, 2008, may be entered in either the 2009 competition or the 2010 competition, but not in both.)
Each entry consists of a multi-page PDF document describing and illustrating your project in detail, and incorporating all the project team information in the entry form at the front or rear of the document.
Your PDF file must include narrative descriptions and photographs. The narrative must explain research or other scientific activities to be conducted in the lab, the owner’s criteria for the project, the lab design solution, safety features, some description of the building engineering and sustainability features, and the site. Include total project cost, cost per square meter, and what is included in that cost; simple floor plans, site plans, and elevations; and an explanation of outstanding features. Your completed PDF file must be uploaded to https://www.advantagemedia.com/RD/Default.aspx.
To be considered for a Renovated Laboratory of the Year Award, the PDF document must include information (graphics and text) regarding the laboratory as it existed before the renovation, along with the information described elsewhere in this form on the renovation itself. Information on why the change was made, what challenges needed to be overcome, and how those challenges were solved should be included in the entry to assist the judging panel in their deliberations.
4. Your PDF document should also include written permission from each photographer or photography studio stating that all images submitted for the 2009 Laboratory of the Year application can be used in R&D Magazine or any other Advantage Business Media publication FREE OF CHARGE for any or all of the following: editorial coverage, advertising, promotional material, or any other purpose deemed necessary by R&D Magazine. Proper credit will be give to the photographer or photography studio if any images are used. Letters from the submitter are not acceptable unless the submitter owns the copyright to the image and states this in the letter.
In addition to this PDF document, submitters must create one set of no less than 25 and no more than 35 separate digital images, supplied as duplicate low-resolution and high-resolution shots on two separate CDs (no DVDs please). PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, or Word files with embedded images are not acceptable for photographs. High-resolution images should be 300 dpi in .tif or .jpg format (.eps acceptable for line art such as floor plans); low-resolution images should be 72-dpi .jpg files.
File names should be assigned in the order you wish the images to be judged, and should include the order number, the project name, and a one-word description (i.e., 01_projectname_exterior). A separate document included on the low-res CD should provide a caption and a photographer credit for each image, keyed to the file names.
The image set should include the following: site plan; floor plan or plans, especially of representative lab floor(s); at least four exterior views; interior views including work areas, six different views of laboratories, and furnishings; safety considerations, exits, and any special outstanding features. Slides must show each of the major elevations. At least one outside view should show the relationship of the new laboratory to neighboring buildings and facilities, if applicable.
Send CDs with photographs to: Julie S. Higginbotham, Editor. 25 Northwest Point Blvd., Suite 550, Elk Grove Blvd., IL 60523.
NOTE: Photos may duplicate those in your PDF entry, but may also show different views.
Note: Be sure you have provided adequate written and visual information about the lab and its mission.
Entries will not be considered without the above submission materials.
JUDGING
A jury of representatives from the architectural, scientific, and laboratory equipment communities, plus the editors of R&D Magazine, will select the laboratories that merit awards. Judges individually review each entry prior to a roundtable discussion with R&D Magazine editors. At the roundtable meeting, project descriptions are discussed, images from your CD are reviewed and winners (if any) are selected.
At the discretion of the judges, Labs of the Year may be selected in any or all of the new, renovated, adaptive reuse or built-to-fit categories. High Honors may be awarded to labs in any of these categories that just miss LOY status. Special Mention awards may be made to facilities with outstanding merit in one specific category. The judges may select no winners at all, if none seems worthy.
Use our on-line interface to register your project for the competition and submit your $250 entry fee.
Use our on-line interface to upload your completed PDF narrative document, which incorporates all the project team information in the entry form, as well as photographer permission letters.
Send your high-res and low-res image CDs, which include a caption file and photographer credit information, to Julie Higginbotham as discussed above.
Entry materials and image CDs will not be returned. All material submitted, including pictures, may be used in R&D Magazine and other Advantage Business Media publications free of charge.
Winners only will be notified on or after February 27, 2009.
The formal Laboratory of the Year award presentation will take place at the Spring 2009 Laboratory Design Conference (March 24, Hilton Rockville Md.). Winning teams will be invited to make a short presentation about their projects and answer attendee questions.
R&D Magazine reserves the right to modify or eliminate the formal presentation program.
Award recipients will be notified before publicity is sent to the media.
Editor's Take
R&D 100: Spacebound and multicore
July 2, 2009
On July 15, the editors of R&D Magazine will announce the winners of the 47th annual R&D 100 Awards. As always, these are the cream of the crop in high-tech products from a wide spectrum of innovators. We’ll see winners from tiny start-up companies boldly entering new markets. We’ll see highly refined instruments from top science OEMs. We’ll see elegant solutions to problems deceptively simple and horrendously complex. And we’ll probably see some wild stuff from research labs around the country and abroad.
Whether we’ll also glimpse a winner that has an extra “wow” factor that makes it household name (think fax machine, Blu-Ray, Kodak film) for decades remains to be seen, but it’s safe to predict that, behind the scenes, many of this year’s R&D 100 Awards winners will have a lasting impact.
The frequent newsmaking ability of former winners leads me to this conclusion. Earlier this week, research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan announced that it had presented NeXolve Corp. with a product innovation award for its CORIN polyimide, which was a 2008 R&D 100 winner entered by NeXolve’s parent corporation, ManTech International. The colorless, transparent, organic/inorganic nanocomposite material has been tapped as a lightweight replacement for glass in space-borne photovoltaic arrays. Such arrays will likely become far more commonplace as efforts like the International Space Station and lunar exploration proceed.
On the national laboratory side of things, software advances have given rise to whole new pseudo-agencies, such as DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, which is devoted to solving complex and numerically immense physical problems using massively parallel supercomputers. In June of this year, a 2005 R&D 100 winner, VisIt, was stretched to new performances levels by leveraging up to 32,000 processing cores to process datasets of a staggering 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. VisIt is the sort of fluids visualization tool that will be used to characterize reactions like those that will take place in the National Ignition Facility. Understanding exactly how these reactions might take place will be crucial to cracking the puzzle of fusion, and colorful visuals are a fast way to gain insights into the mathematics of the processes.
These are just two recent examples of R&D 100 Awards winners making a splash. It will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks what new waves will be set in motion.
