I2SL Annual Conference Recap: Q/A with Garry Cooper
Q. What is Rheaply striving to do for the research community?
A: Rheaply is trying to increase cost savings at universities, reduce the amount of hazardous waste in cabinets, freezers and shelves, and connect potential collaborators. I have a scapegoat of the word collaboration — people normally mean PI to PI — but collaboration happens at the graduate student level too. This platform helps graduate students connect to complete technical daily tasks.
Q. What is Rheaply’s overall mission?
A: Rheaply’s mission is simple: make research better. We think making research better will incrementally help the world become a little better. We think that the best way of doing that is by sharing valuable resources that have already been purchased. Those resources could be physical things, as well as expertise.
Q. What was the genesis of Rheaply?
A: I received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Northwestern University and I studied for one year as a postdoc at the Feinberg School of Medicine. One day I was helping my lab manager clean out a freezer. We would typically clean out someone’s space when they left the lab, and our cleanout wasn’t “does anyone else need this” — it was labeling items as hazardous or regular waste. We were throwing out 25 perfectly usable antibodies at a time. I decided to walk next door — it was an open lab space — and ask other scientists if they could use the extra antibodies. One of the scientists there said yes and took four of them, but before I left she asked “Well, what can I do for you?”
That’s where the idea of Rheaply started to germinate in my mind. There was a need for a marketplace approach to displaying these surplus items with some residual value. I took the idea to my department chair and did what I do best — researched it — and found that no real platform existed that did this. So I decided to build one.
Q. What’s different about the Rheaply platform?
A. On our platform, things are more efficient because you don’t have to rebuy products. This promotes sustainable research for obvious reasons. But it’s more than that. We’re connecting people on campuses who would have otherwise not known each other, and we have tons of testimonials of people just looking for help on Python code or needing to debug a certain system.
When did you realize the problem wasn’t local to your lab?
A. We did a market survey on both Northwestern University campuses with about 120 academic researchers spanning 8 academic departments. Here were the four biggest takeaways:
- Most people were interested in a marketplace for scientific resource exchange at universities.
- The majority of researchers already take surplus items from other labs — so this sort of behavior existed already.
- Almost everyone polled did not know of a platform with this exchange process.
- Northwestern University has about a $7 million worth of surplus items alone, despite being a top ten “green university” in the U.S. So we immediately began to realize the potential for this nationwide.
Why, outside of sustainability, is Rheaply important?
A. If you’ve been reading anything about science, you know that scientific funding is going down. Studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of scientists believe this is the biggest problem in science.
But it’s more than that. It’s not just a funding issue, it’s a cost of experimentation issue. Resources are going down, and the costs of experiments are going up. In real dollars, the NIH has lost a large proportion of their purchasing power in recent years. Even though congressman say that we are appropriating more dollars towards funding, when you adjust for inflation that’s definitely not true. The BRDPI, an inflationary measurement by the NIH, estimates how much an experiment costs relative to the year. They estimate it costs 18–19% more to conduct experiments today than it did in 2008.
Where did you get the name Rheaply?
A. It’s a made up word by putting together “making research more cheaply”. By cheap, of course we mean more efficient. We think you do that by connecting people that wouldn’t otherwise be connected. The name also derived from the word “reapply” — we reapply these resources in a different or new setting.
What is the value of Rheaply to researchers and marketplaces?
A. There are 5 buckets of value.
- Products are cheaper. Things are bought secondhand — if even they are bought at all. Most items are free or available for trade.
- Acquiring these products takes less time. The procurement cycle can be less than 5 minutes if a buyer and seller are in close proximity.
- More collaborative. We’ve built an algorithm that connects people based by the research they are conducting, not just what they are offering.
- There’s less “gunk” in the lab, leading to a safer lab
- Rheaply helps to maintain stringent compliance and uniform guidance rules.
About I2SL
Located in Boston, Massachusetts, I2SL is the premier sustainability training and exposition for high-technology facility professionals. It’s also global leader and primary resource connecting all stakeholders and providing information and education to ensure safe, sustainable laboratory design, operation, and use.
