From Chaos to Competitive Innovation
Making the case for education standards in laboratory automation
I've worked with dozens of educators to bring automation to their classrooms. From professors at the world's top universities to teachers pioneering vocational education, from high school instructors to community lab leaders. I've seen it all, and I’m lucky to me one of just a few people with this perspective on automation education.
Through these experiences, I've learned exactly what it takes to bring automation into a classroom. Some parts are easy: students tend to love working with automation. Some of it is hard: you need to provide meaningful hands-on time to as many students as possible. Then, there's the downright frustrating part is begging for a solution.
There are currently no education standards or guidelines for teaching laboratory automation.
It’s a topic I’ve mentioned before, and today, we’re going all in.
The Disconnect Between Education and Employment
Despite automation becoming ubiquitous in research laboratories across industry and academia, the majority of educational programs have yet to integrate meaningful automation training into their curricula. This systemic oversight has created a profound skills gap that is undermining the scientific ecosystem, a gap that widens daily with the rapid adoption of automation and AI.
While over half of life science labs now use some form of automation, only a vanishingly small percentage of undergraduate or graduate programs include any substantive automation training. Graduates are emerging from academic programs fundamentally unprepared for the modern research environment. Without standardized exposure to automation technologies, students lack a relevant framework for demonstrating their capabilities, leaving potential employers in an increasingly difficult recruitment position.
Why Education Standards are The Key Log in the Jam
In logging operations, when logs jam up in a river, there's often one "key log" that, once moved, allows the entire jam to break free and flow again. In the challenge of modernizing science education, automation standards are that key log.
Without established standards, each institution must "reinvent the wheel" when developing automation curricula. This creates an enormous barrier to entry for educators genuinely interested in introducing automation courses. They must tediously develop a curriculum from scratch, constantly justifying each component to themselves and skeptical administrators without comprehensive guidance or external validation.
Here are some of the typical questions educators face: What equipment should we purchase? What skills are fundamental versus specialized? How do we assess competency? What prerequisite knowledge is necessary? At what educational level should different concepts be introduced?
Clear standards provide a well-reasoned starting point to build on established best practices. They can break the cycle of hesitation that is preventing meaningful educational innovation.
The Cost of Standardless Education
The absence of standards isn't merely inconvenient. It cultivates systemic inefficiencies.
Around the world, educators duplicate efforts rather than building on established foundations. Every hour spent reinventing fundamental curricula comes at the cost of pedagogical innovation. This massive resource waste is happening simultaneously in hundreds of institutions, each struggling through the same challenges in isolation.
Graduating students submit hundreds of job applications, hoping that just one will turn into an opportunity. Employers are inundated with applications, some qualified, some not, and struggle to identify future employees. What emerges is a haphazard system where applicants are culled based on how they describe their training, and neither applicants nor companies feel like they are getting the best outcome from the situation.
Most concerning to us all should be how this bottlenecks innovation. Our workforce lacks the technological fluency to fully leverage available tools, so automated systems sit underutilized. Experimental possibilities remain unexplored, and the pace of discovery diminishes, all because we haven't systematically taught people how to use the tools we've created.
Students today are right to question if they are being trained for yesterday's scientific workplace instead of tomorrow's.
Local Success, National Potential
Seeking to ensure they get highly applicable and employable training, more and more students are seeking out vocational programs. It’s a strong option, and community colleges have shown greater agility than universities in adapting to automation needs. Their close ties with local industry create natural feedback loops that inform curriculum development. When local employers express needs for specific skills, community colleges respond quickly with targeted programs.
I often think about a community college I’ve worked with in New York City. They have built a remarkable engineering program with an emphasis on robotics and automation and a local reputation to match. They employ a full-time industry specialist who works closely with their student advisor to ensure program alignment with real-world needs. This specialist maintains relationships with a diverse array of local businesses, from small and medium enterprises to larger corporations, creating a continuous feedback loop that keeps their curriculum relevant.
The results speak for themselves: exceptional job placement rates and strengthened local partnerships. Employers know exactly what skills graduates bring, while students enjoy clear pathways to employment. This is a success story worth celebrating and replicating.
However, this localized approach, while effective, faces scalability challenges. When students trained at one community college seek employment in another region, employers have no frame of reference to evaluate their training. Without standardized credentials or outcomes, the value of a student's education becomes deeply dependent on geographic location and employer familiarity with specific programs.
What works brilliantly at the local level could work even better at a national scale. The dedicated work these community colleges do to build industry relationships and align curricula with workplace needs represents an essential mechanism for successful workforce development. With proper standards in place, these successful models could be scaled more efficiently, allowing the innovations of one institution to benefit students and employers nationwide.
From Fragmentation to Framework
Education standards for laboratory automation would do two essential things: define core competencies and establish consistent assessment methods. As simple as that sounds, the impact would be revolutionary.
Right now, educators are recreating the wheel in isolation. A Southern California professor with supportive administration and nearby colleagues still spent countless hours figuring out automation integration basics. At elite universities, students access diverse equipment through institutional funding. Meanwhile, an East Coast state university professor schedules student shifts around a single robot—solving access but consuming his nights and weekends.
The cost of this fragmentation falls heavily on students. Those fortunate enough to gain automation skills quickly secure competitive positions, while equally talented peers face months of job searching. Industry leaders are crystal clear: they need people with both technical and scientific knowledge, but these candidates remain frustratingly rare.
Carnegie Mellon's Automated Science program shows what's possible with thoughtful implementation, but even they've had to forge ahead without guideposts. Imagine if they could build on established foundations instead of creating everything from scratch.
Standards wouldn't constrain our teaching—they'd liberate it. They'd create a universal language where a high school automation course in Louisiana translates meaningfully to colleges nationwide and where employers immediately understand the capabilities of graduates from programs they've never heard of.
This isn't just about efficiency—it's about impact. Without standards, we lack the full-spectrum training, from laboratory technician to PI to business leader, required to support robust innovation.
These are the table stakes for a globally competitive innovation engine.
Globally Competitive Innovation
We stand at the threshold of what many, myself included, believe will be biology's most transformative era. The tools for radical innovation aren't hypothetical—they're here. Automation and AI have reached the minimum capacity required to move the once hypothetical science fiction to scientific infrastructure. Every piece of the technological puzzle is in place—except one.
We've revolutionized the tools but haven’t taught scientists how to use them.
Each year we delay implementing education standards represents thousands of missed discoveries and unrealized innovations that compound over time. Scientists trained without automation skills will struggle to lead our research programs in the future.
The longer we delay establishing standards, the wider the skills gap grows, and the more difficult it becomes to bridge. Each year that passes represents another cohort of students entering the workforce without the technological fluency they need.
Charting a Path Forward
Creating educational standards for laboratory automation requires a coalition of diverse stakeholders working together. I’m working with top professors in the field to build the first comprehensive laboratory automation education standards, but success depends on bringing all voices to the table. This includes:
Educators who understand classroom constraints and possibilities
Industry leaders who can articulate workplace skill requirements
Educational technology providers who can align tools with standards
Students and recent graduates who've navigated the current fragmented system
We're building the foundation for scientific education that will power future decades of innovation. If you're teaching with automation, developing educational technology, or represent an institution that can implement these standards, we need your expertise now.
Join us before another cohort of students graduates unprepared and another year of innovation potential is lost. Just drop a comment here, and we can chat.
Together, we'll transform automation education from a privilege for the few to a pathway for all.