RED Core Facilities

The Animal Resources Center (ARC) is an AAALAC approved animal research facility, providing  researchers with the opportunity to study a diverse number of animal species.  ARC maintains animal housing rooms, observation rooms, and procedure rooms at BSL 1 and 2 containment levels. The ARC is supported by certified veterinarians and animal care technicians who provide technical support and veterinary care.

Director: Kerri Jones

The ARL utilizes MSU faculty, students and staff combined with Montana industry to engage in many areas of the university’s research expertise, including laser and photonics, advanced manufacturing, advanced materials, and cyber security.

Director: Al Deibert
Program Lead: Ben Dahlke

The CBE at MSU is the world’s first, largest, and best-known biofilm research center. This interdisciplinary resource has two core facilities to support research and education for faculty, staff, students, and visitors: 

• The Bioimaging Core has state-of-the-art light and chemical imaging capabilities
• The Analytical Core has liquid and gas chromatography, spectroscopy & molecular analysis tools 

Director: Matthew Fields   Managers: Heidi Smith and Kristen Connolly

The Cryo-EM core facility at MSU is a regional facility that brings state of the art cryo-EM capabilities, including single particle analysis and cryo-electron tomography, to the Northern Rocky Mountains. Instrumentation includes a 200 kV Talos Arctica with a Gatan K3 camera, 120 kV Tecnai Spirit, and a Vitrobot Mark IV. Collectively, these instruments allow imaging of biological structures at single nanometer to subnanometer resolutions, and thus enable 3D modeling of cells, viruses, proteins, nucleic acid and other soft matter at the atomic level.

Director: Martin Lawrence    Manager: Ravi Thakkar

The GCF is a collaborative space for geospatial research and education across MSU and beyond. Integrating expert knowledge with cutting-edge technologies, the GCF provides the capacity for insightful spatial analysis, enabling projects such as mapping and quantifying plant productivity, bringing historic paper maps into the digital age, and making maps and visualizations in your proposal stand out. The GCF welcomes ideas, questions, and collaborations from all research and teaching disciplines, community partners, and stakeholders.   

Director: Eric Sproles
Manager: Jackson Rose

ICAL is a mid-sized, user-oriented core facility that supports basic and applied research in all science and engineering disciplines at MSU, collaborating universities, and industrial partners.

Director: Recep Avci
Manager: Sara Zacher

The MMF is a micro and nanofabrication facility that offers a range of processing and packaging capabilities including lithography, wet and dry etching, thin film deposition, dicing, wire bonding, metrology, and inspection. We welcome requests for remote work and strive to provide the best possible user experience.   

Director: David Dickensheets    Manager: Andrew Lingley

The mission of the MSMS is to seed methods, technology, and training to students and research labs at MSU and affiliated programs. The facility offers a full range of services from small molecule identification to the complete characterization of complex biological mixtures.

Director: Brian Bothner   Manager: Don Smith

The Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Core Facility houses four state-of-the-art solution NMR spectrometers of different magnetic field strengths and complementary NMR capabilities. The NMR instruments are used to characterize, at the atomic level, the molecular arrangements and dynamic properties of small molecules, natural products, chemical synthesis and reaction intermediates, polymers, and complex biological macromolecules. 

Director: Valérie Copié   Manager: Brian Tripet

RCI provides high-performance computing (HPC), virtual machine hosting, large scale storage, and high-performance networking and data transfer systems and services, consulting on technology budgets and implementation for grants, and support for IT components of major research instrumentation, software, and specialized or unique research technology needs.

Director: Coltran Hophan-Nichols

Social Data Collection and Analysis Services (Social Data) is a facility at Montana State University that enables the collection of high-quality data for researchers employing a variety of social and behavioral methods. Social Data, previously the HELPS Lab, has been successfully providing research services since 2015. Social Data is open to the broader community of researchers, with an emphasis on providing tools necessary for researchers to study interactions between human systems and other complex phenomena like public health and ecosystems. Director: Eric Raile
Manager: Greta Linse