edfas.org ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 27 NO. 3 44 INVENTOR'S CORNER BOLTING A GLOVE BOX TO A MICROSCOPE: HOW A LAB INVENTION BECAME A PRODUCT Valerie Brogden, University of Oregon vbrogden@uoregon.edu What do you do when your clients need electron microscope images of a sample that can’t touch air? You bolt a glove box to the microscope. That’s how Noble Dome was born: a glove box loadlock that attaches directly to the side of an electron microscope. It wasn’t some grand, theoretical idea. It came from real lab work and real customer frustration. FROM CUSTOMER PAIN POINTS TO PROTOTYPE As a lab manager, I’m constantly fielding strange samples and obscure questions. That’s the job—figuring out how to get meaningful data out of unusual materials. One day, it struck me: the most innovative solutions I’ve seen aren’t from well-funded R&D teams. They’re from scrappy, under-resourced labs where you have to make do—and sometimes invent something new just to get the job done. I started receiving frequent requests for electron microscopy images of battery samples, with clients saying, “I need images, but you can’t get any air on it… can you do that?” I looked at the air-free transfer tools on the market. They were expensive, impractical, or just not designed for the kind of work we need to do. Finally, I asked: Can’t we just bolt a glove box onto the tool? So we did. Working with the university’s machine shop, we designed an airtight dome and all the hardware to go with it. It seemed so obvious we couldn’t believe no one had done it yet—so we filed a patent. TALKING TO THE MARKET At that point, I started wondering if other labs might want one too. That led me to the NSF iCorps program, which helps academic inventors explore commercialization. One of the biggest things I learned? Startups fail all the Valerie Brogden next to her Noble Dome invention.
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