FEATURE STORY
TEST AHEAD OF THE REST How fast action, leadership and COLSA’s biomedical expertise is helping UNH fight COVID-19 Six months later, Hubbard Chair of Biological Sciences and Professor Kelley Thomas says there are still no words to describe how he felt the first time he flipped the lights on in UNH’s proprietary COVID-19 testing lab last fall. After months of working around the clock with his team to establish the facility, the director of the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies looked around at the PCR instruments and the high throughput robotic pipetting stations. Students were back on campus. Samples were coming in to be tested. What they’d set out to do was working. “There’s no practicing this,” says Thomas, who serves as the lab’s scientific director. “You can’t say, ‘send me 4,000 samples so we can try this out.’”
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