Running a modern research lab involves more than maintaining instruments; it requires training, access control, scheduling, billing, and other administrative tasks. Large shared facilities must coordinate these activities across hundreds of instruments and thousands of users. As interdisciplinary work grows, simply locating the right capability becomes a bottleneck. The 2026 NEMO User Meeting at MIT.nano gathered 65 representatives from 25 institutions to share lab‑management approaches, centering on the open‑source NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO) platform.
NEMO was first released as open‑source software by NIST in 2018, and its community edition NEMO‑CE launched in 2023, allowing facilities to develop and share extensions. Presentations highlighted Stanford’s real‑time equipment status dashboard, Columbia’s billing and workflow extensions, Princeton’s automated process charts, and the University of Pennsylvania’s chemical‑management tools, illustrating how facilities of varying scale can address similar operational challenges on a common platform.
As the community expands, discovering and accessing distributed capabilities emerges as a new need. MIT.nano introduced Hydra, an open‑source technical concierge that synchronizes data from multiple NEMO instances in real time, eliminating the need for manually maintained static webpages or databases. Hydra does not replace any lab‑management system; it aggregates the ground‑truth information from each facility, enabling researchers to find required instruments without first knowing which lab hosts them.
The flexibility of open‑source software lets facilities quickly adapt to new instruments, methods, and user communities. At MIT.nano, NEMO supports over 1,600 active researchers, more than 200 tools, and roughly 160,000 tool‑hours per year. Even a small improvement in an administrative workflow can be multiplied across thousands of interactions, delivering significant efficiency gains.
Closing discussions looked ahead to data integration, automation, and artificial intelligence in lab operations. Participants envisioned a network where ideas and solutions are shared—a phenomenon dubbed the “NEMO wave.” The ultimate goal is to make instruments, expertise, and capabilities more readily available to the research community, accelerating the path from idea to experiment to real‑world impact.
Review: The open‑source NEMO platform together with Hydra demonstrates a scalable approach to shared‑facility management; community collaboration and real‑time data synchronization are key to boosting research efficiency.