Research can depend on equipment and expertise spread across multiple facilities. But before researchers can use those resources, facilities must manage access, training, scheduling, equipment, and billing—and researchers need a way to find the right capabilities in the first place. At the 2026 NEMO User Meeting, participants discussed tools for both challenges: improving operations within individual labs and connecting information across them.
One platform, many facility needs
Hosted by MIT.nano Oct. 5–6, the meeting brought together 65 representatives from 25 laboratories and organizations. Attendees included facility directors, laboratory managers, technical staff, software developers, industry representatives, and government researchers. The Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) hub sponsored the gathering, which focused on sharing lab management approaches and building connections among facilities.
At the center was NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO), an open-source platform for managing shared research facilities. Individual labs can adapt it to their needs. The meeting showed how facilities with different scales and scientific missions can still face similar operational challenges.
NEMO was released as open-source software by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2018. Its community edition, NEMO-CE, launched in 2023 and enables facilities to develop and share extensions. At the meeting, participants from MIT; Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton universities; the University of Pennsylvania; NIST; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Atlantis Labs presented tools for areas including chemical management, user administration, equipment status, training, and workflow automation.
Local improvements can travel
Presentations showed how facilities have tailored the platform. Stanford shared real-time displays for equipment status and reservations. Columbia described its NEMO migration and extensions for billing and facility workflows. Princeton demonstrated automated process charts to monitor tool performance, while the University of Pennsylvania presented chemical management approaches.
The shared model means a solution developed for one facility may be useful to others. Anna Osherov, associate director of Characterization.nano and meeting organizer, described open source as a way for facilities to build on existing work, contribute improvements, and develop a more capable platform together.
The scale at MIT.nano illustrates why small operational changes can matter. NEMO supports more than 1,600 active researchers using more than 200 tools, with approximately 160,000 hours of tool usage each year. Jorg Scholvin, associate director of Fab.nano, said improvements to administrative workflows can add up across thousands of users and equipment interactions.
Making capabilities easier to discover
Managing a facility is only part of the challenge. Universities and research organizations also have specialized equipment and expertise that researchers may not know how to locate. In microelectronics R&D, work may require fabrication at one facility, advanced characterization at another, and specialized microscopy or process capabilities elsewhere. Finding where and when those resources are accessible can become a bottleneck.
Static webpages and databases can describe facilities, but their information may become outdated as resources change. MIT.nano presented Hydra, an open-source platform being developed with support from NEMC as part of the NEMC Technical Concierge program. The program aims to help researchers identify and access specialized capabilities across a network of facilities.
Hydra is designed to connect multiple NEMO installations and draw information from the systems facilities already use, rather than depend on someone manually maintaining a separate database. NEMO remains the operational source of information for an individual facility; Hydra is intended to make that information discoverable across facilities. Osherov described the platform as connecting and synchronizing information across connected systems in real time.
Infrastructure that can adapt
The meeting also looked ahead to data integration, automation, and artificial intelligence in lab operations. Open-source tools give facilities a way to respond to new instruments, research methods, user communities, and requirements while sharing improvements with others.
Participants described the NEMO community as a network for exchanging ideas and solving problems. For researchers, the broader aim is practical: make distributed research infrastructure easier to find and use, while giving facilities tools that can evolve with their needs.