The Department of Animal Medicine and the Regional Primate Research Center of the University of Washington provide important animal resources for scientific investigation. The Department of Botany has a greenhouse and a large-scale plant growth chamber. The Departments of Zoology and Botany have walk-in cold rooms with running sea water. The Friday Harbor Laboratories is a modern facility for collecting, storing, and studying marine animals and plants. All student and staff home directories are kept on a central disk store of 30,000 megabytes that is backed up to tape daily.
All graduate students have accounts.
A full-time systems programmer maintains this facility and often writes customized computer programs to help with various student research tasks. The departmental confocal microscope and a new transmission EM store video picture files directly to this central disk store. The basic research facility consists of about 30 laboratories. A number of the staff scientists hold affiliate professorships in academic departments of the University of Washington and are active in university teaching and the supervising of graduate students.