Nano Fabrication Lab Point of contact for the production The staff of the Nano Fabrication Lab largely of tiny structures carry out their work in clean rooms belong- ing to the NF Lab. These facilities provide controlled conditions with minimized particle concentrations that are essential for the pro- In 2024, work at the Nano Fabrication Lab (NF Lab) was carried duction and machining of micro and nano- out by over 70 researchers from the University of Basel and from structured materials. the two companies Nanosurf and Qnami. Although researchers use the lab’s instruments largely independently, they are reliant on the NF Lab team’s experts when it comes to the intensive “The NF Lab and other part- training, servicing and maintenance work on these heavily used ners help us to obtain the instruments, which play a vital role in their research projects. best possible nanopore For the four-person NF Lab team, 2024 was dominated by the chips for our highly sensi- training of two new part-time employees and the improvement tive experiments with of organizational structures. For example, responsibilities for single-molecule resolution.” the diverse range of equipment were redistributed within the Professor Sonja Schmid, team, so that tasks such as maintenance, repair and the training Department of Chemistry, of new users are now spread across the four members of staff. University of Basel The team also introduced a new accounting system that allows for fairer billing of costs arising as a function of instrument use — based on the cost per hour or cost per process. Moreover, the team implemented improved guidelines on cleanliness and safety in the clean room in 2024, reducing the particle concen- tration and the risk of accidents. The year 2024 also saw the team improve various aspects of communication. For example, since the section of the NF Lab’s clean room space that entered operation in 2023 is located in the building of the Department of Biosystems Science and En- gineering of ETH Zurich in Basel (D-BSSE), there are regular meet- 54 SNI Annual Report 2024