The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

12.18. Neuroscience Lab

By Colin Gerber, December 2013.

Overview. A neuroscience lab is doing Parkinson’s disease research in which they do experiments with rats. They use different types of rats, surgeries, and drugs for experiments and have to keep track of all this information for data analysis, publications, and lab inspectors.

The existing organizing system was developed before personal computers were prevalent and has slowly evolved over time. However, much of the underlying structure of the system still has its roots in pre-computer concepts. In order to update the system to incorporate more modern technologies what are the changes to the resources, their descriptions, and the systems structure that need to be made?

What is being organized? Resources in the current organizing system include rats, surgeries, experiments, drugs, and data recorded from the experiments. There are some other resources that could be incorporated into the organizing system.

Neuroscience Research Equipment

Physical resources in the author's lab are arranged to facilitate the precise accuracy of interactions required in medical research. In this photo, an array of amplifiers and filters for processing and recording rats' brainwave signals (left) is installed in a vertical rack that can be located close to the equipment used to perform surgeries.

(Photo by Colin Gerber. Used with permission.)

One such new ...