Pictured clockwise from left are Instrumentation Services team members Tim Hite, Wayne Skloss, Dr. Ken Andrews (director of distributed learning), Cecil Brown and Steven de la Fuente, along with intern Mark Quesada from St. Philip’s College.
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Contact: Will Sansom
Phone: (210) 567-2579

SAN ANTONIO (Dec. 7, 2007) — Wayne Skloss, Tim Hite, Steven de la Fuente and Cecil Brown may not be household names at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, but their ingenuity and craftsmanship, offered at a competitive price by the Division of Instrumentation Services, surely rank them among the institution’s most valuable players.

Department of Physiology faculty and students can thank de la Fuente, an electronics specialist, and Hite, a machinist, for the frog-egg holders and fly-food mixer. The mixer enables lab technicians to prepare the fly food in half the time and move on to other pressing work. It makes a brick of food at the right consistency for flies to bore holes through for a week. (For more details, see accompanying article.)

De la Fuente is developing an adjustable cell-splitter instrument for the Department of Cellular and Structural Biology. It is a 20-by-22-inch box with two petri dish trays and high-powered LED lights that radiate through the bottom of the trays to split cells.

Like his colleagues, de la Fuente is an unsung person whose talents enrich the institution’s research. He currently provides mentorship to two biomedical equipment interns from St. Philip’s College, thus helping the Health Science Center to provide a rich training opportunity to these students.

“When faculty come to us saying here’s what we want, we figure out what to do,” Skloss, a machinist, said. “They give us the idea, we figure it out. We improvise, enhance what we have and present a prototype for the researcher to consider.”

Steven de la Fuente (left) and Cecil Brown (right) of Instrumentation Services fine-tune equipment in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Dube (center), Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

The craftsmen have thorough discussions with the professors about how a project could be done, factoring in the complexities of machinery or electronics. “Sometimes we have to tell them it might take longer than they thought,” Hite said.

In addition to electronics and mechanical fabrication jobs, the group also services and repairs medical and lab equipment, and calibrates balances and scales for several institutions, including the Health Science Center and its clinical and academic partners.

Skloss, working with a team from the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, developed a hospital bed arm sling for burn patients.

Skloss is also on a U.S. patent for an indoor hippotherapy device. Hippotherapy, which is done outdoors on horses, is the use of equestrian motion to provide therapy to children with cerebral palsy and other conditions. A former Department of Occupational Therapy faculty member, Theresa Nalty, is also on that patent.

Instrumentation Services, a division of the Office of Academic Informatics Services, is a small unit, yet provides a large benefit to the Health Science Center. It also represents a substantial savings to the taxpayers of Texas. “We charge half to a third of what the same service would cost on the outside,” said Ken Andrews, Ph.D., director of distributed learning in Academic Informatics Services.

The Instrumentation Services Web page lists the mission and units of the division.

“Our highly trained staff is dedicated to the goal of generating creative product ideas that combine maximum efficiency, quality and performance,” Dr. Andrews said. “This is done in conjunction with the Health Science Center’s missions of research, teaching and patient care.”

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The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $576 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $15.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields.