Building connections across the research infrastructure

MIT.nano hosted the 2026 NEMO User Meeting on Oct. 5–6, drawing 65 representatives from 25 laboratories and organizations, MIT News reports. Sponsored by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) hub, the gathering focused on how shared research facilities can manage their operations and connect with one another. NEMO, short for NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations, is open-source lab management software released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2018. A community edition followed in 2023, letting facilities build and share extensions.

Presenters from institutions including MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, NIST, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Atlantis Labs, which manages the community edition, showed tools for tasks such as billing, chemical management, training and equipment monitoring. Stanford demonstrated real-time status and reservation displays, while Princeton showed automated charts that track tool performance.

The main announcement was Hydra, an open-source platform MIT.nano is developing with NEMC support as part of its Technical Concierge program. It links separate NEMO installations and pulls data directly from systems facilities already run, replacing manually maintained directories that can go stale. Anna Osherov, the meeting's organizer and associate director of Characterization.nano, said Hydra does not replace lab management systems but synchronizes data across them in real time.

The stakes are practical, particularly in microelectronics, where a project may need fabrication, characterization and microscopy at different sites. MIT.nano says NEMO alone supports more than 1,600 active researchers and over 200 tools there, with about 160,000 tool hours annually. Closing discussions turned to data integration, automation and artificial intelligence in lab operations.