Welcome to the Green Labs Newsletter! We hope this monthly round up of news, tips, and awards will help incite and continue your interest in sustainable practices in the laboratory. 

By participating, your lab could win up to $5,000 for improving your freezer maintenance practices. 

Vendor fair and GRCF service exhibitors!

The JHU Office of Sustainability and the GRCF are a featured partnership of the event.

Keynote: “Sequencing Benny: The Biodiversity Crisis” Alan Scott, PhD

Plenary: "Digging into genomics with BIODIGS at under-resourced institutions” Ava Hoffman, PhD

THE ONE AND ONLY CRB FARMERS MARKET RETURNS THURSDAY 4/18/24

And will continue on Thursdays until the end of the season!

Please bring your compostable food scraps!

When she’s not working, Leana loves/hates to run, enjoys cooking, traveling, and spending time in the outdoors with her family, as well as rooting for the O’s.

Leana Houser is the Sustainability Manager, Zero Waste for the Office of Sustainability. She researches and develops best practices for institutional waste reduction and diversion and works to engage all members of the Johns Hopkins community in reducing the generation of waste and encouraging the responsible reuse and recycling of materials. Her dedication to protecting the health of the environment and the people in it began during her camping excursions every summer as a child and carried through to rural St Mary’s College of Maryland, where she earned a BA in Public Policy. Leana continues ever stronger as a proud resident of Baltimore City and has been committed to sustainability issues for her entire career at Hopkins, which began in 2003, including receiving her Master’s in Environmental Science and Policy from the JHU Advanced Academic Programs.

Does your lab turn off equipment after use, have automatic lights, utilize outlet timers, or have high efficiency freezers? You likely are already eligible for a Green Labs certification!

Contact sustainability@jh.edu directly with questions or to start the process. 

Learn more here!

Check out Green Labs Ambassador Training** to learn more and start your lab off with more sustainable practices safe and beneficial to your experiments and work!

**you must be logged into myLearning in order to access this site

Be one in a million [signatures]! Join other scientists worldwide who want to see the scientific field lead the world to a better climate future and are requesting action by research funders to set expectations for efficiency, resiliency, and sustainability in the way scientific research is conducted.

At most 30 minutes. However, use of UV to sterilize laminar flow hoods is controversial. The NIH in fact does not allow UV lights to be installed in BSL-II cabinets, as they are "not recommended nor necessary". See here for the NIH's guidance. If you are using UV sterilization, ensure your bulb is still emitting UV and double sterilize with disinfectant always!