[tcpekin]

Grad students at Cal cost a professor ~100k a year, and then leave after 2-5 years with any optimizations they might have personally made. They also only work 6-12 hours a day, and having been said grad student, get mind numbingly bored after about 10-15 repetitive syntheses, spending lots of time on them, when the (only) interesting part, is the XRD pattern at the end... I would have absolutely advocated for such an arm if I was still there.

[dekhn]

There are many reasons why wasting a grad student on this problem (rather than a tech) is bad. I say this with a lot of experience: I was that grad student and I was the guy automating the lab and the guy setting up the compute infrastructure.

I think core facilities are better candidate than individual professor labs.