Please follow the steps below to set up your sample processing visit to the NSF/UVM CCF
During the planning/proposing phase of your project
- If you are preparing an NSF proposal and seek to use our laboratory, please be in contact with us for a letter of commitment to include in your proposal.
- Read the Community Cosmogenic Facility Philosophy document to learn more about the facility, our educational mission, and how visits work.
- Read the Visiting the Community Cosmogenic Facility document to learn more about travel, housing, and laboratory schedule.
- Download, fill out, and return to Lee (Ashley.Corbett@uvm.edu) the project application form.
- If your application is accepted, work with Lee (Ashley.Corbett@uvm.edu) to develop a schedule and budget for your project.
- If your application is accepted, download, read, sign, and return the Collaboration Memorandum of Understanding.
Please note that in order to begin scheduling and planning for facility support services, upon your notification of any sponsored award or if you have existing support, we require email notification to include the source of support (Agency, Division, and Program), grant title, and grant number. The terms of our NSF/EAR/IF facility award require that we maintain records of supported projects together with the source of that support to the level of detail defined here wherever possible.
Several months before your visit
- Book housing walking distance to campus (see the "Visiting the Community Cosmogenic Facility" document above for ideas).
- Make travel arrangements (e.g. flight or bus) as necessary.
- Make billing arrangements with the AMS lab you plan to use.
- If you are purifying quartz in your home lab, quartz must be received at UVM 6 weeks prior to extraction.
Several weeks before your visit
- Take a look at our Laboratory Methods to get an idea of what you will be doing.
- Read the recent methods-related publication that describes method optimization for in situ sample preparation.
- Download, fill out, and return to Lee (Ashley.Corbett@uvm.edu.) the Visitor Introduction Template so that we know more about you. We will use this information to report back to NSF about who has visited the facility.
- Download and complete the Sample Submission Form and return it to Lee.
- Take four online safety training courses and forward the confirmation emails to Lee. Please take "Chemical Safety in the Laboratory", "Chemical Waste Disposal Training", "Laboratory Safety Roles and Responsibilities", and "Laboratory Ventilation and Chemical Fume Hoods".
- Download, print, and sign the Safety Memorandum of Understanding and return it to Lee.
- Download, print, and sign the Code of Conduct and return it to Lee.
- Watch the series of training videos describing laboratory methods.
- Ship your sample material to us as necessary, based on the schedule we have agreed on. Please send sample material to:
Lee Corbett
Community Cosmogenic Facility
Delehanty Hall
University of Vermont
180 Colchester Avenue
Burlington, VT 05405
At the end of and after your visit
- Please take all sample material home with you; we are unable to archive sample material due to limited space.
- We will be responsible for packing the cathodes and getting them sent to the AMS laboratory you choose to work with. We will be in touch when the AMS data arrive, likely a month to several months after your visit depending on the AMS laboratory, the isotope to be analyzed, and the AMS schedule at that time of year. At that point, we will send reduced data that are background-corrected.
- Please be in touch with us as you begin to work through conference abstracts and publications. As outlined in the Collaboration Memorandum of Understanding, we want to ensure that all data are presented in a way that will allow for complete recalculation of your inferred exposure ages, burial ages, or erosion rates.
- Please remember to acknowledge NSF EAR-1735676 for support of the NSF/UVM Community Cosmogenic Facility in any publication or presentation whenever possible given space limitations.