Robert Voorhees President & Co-Founder

Professor Estel Sprague Vice-President & Co-Founder

A Word About MeasureNet

MeasureNet was developed in a collaborative effort between the instructional and electronics support staff at the University of Cincinnati's Department of Chemistry. The driving force behind MeasureNet's conception and development sprang from two core convictions. The first was a strong belief that electronic data collection and manipulation was an essential component to teaching basic chemistry concepts in a modern teaching laboratory – particularly using equipment closely resembling instrumentation students would encounter later in professional careers. The second was an equally strong belief that providing the necessary electronics capabilities using numerous personal computers in the laboratory environment was not the best solution for reasons that included issues of maintenance, cost, and space.

After an initial trial period using PC interfaces, it quickly became apparent to the department that maintaining hardware and software for a PC-based interface laboratory was both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore, the relatively short expected lifetime of the PCs (3-5 years) guaranteed considerable ongoing equipment replacement costs for the school.

A collaborative workgroup composed of Bob Voorhees, Estel Sprague, and Paul McKenzie proposed a new type of maintenance-reducing network system. An internal proof-of-concept grant was internally funded by the university and was successfully tested by summer general chemistry students. A shared diode-array spectrometer replaced the early design of a station-based colorimeter and hierarchical menu system was developed to ease student adoption. Major funding was then awarded by the United States National Science Foundation and Procter and Gamble Company. UC incorporated some ten MeasureNet networks using the grant monies that are still in regular use today.

MeasureNet Technology Ltd. was established in 1998, and has since grown beyond the confines of its original General Chemistry lab university environment. MeasureNet Networks can now be found in Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Forensic Chemistry, Quatitative Analysis and Reseasrch labs. A McGill University study comparing teaching lab interfaces acclaimed its user interface as the "most intuitive" and probeware "nearest research quality" of the systems examined. MeasureNet was awarded the Ohio Governor's Award for Excellence in Energy Efficiency in 2002 for its energy-saving and environmentally-friendly design.

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