Adam Regelmann has been in the lab since he was in high school and now, with a doctorate in immunology and a completed residency in internal medicine, he can confidently say that labs can be a “pretty disorganized” place to work. To organize those labs and help with the productivity of the researchers, he says he decided to create a comprehensive tool to alleviate issues of knowing where certain inventory was, how to use it, or how to order equipment if it wasn’t around. He created Quartzy, an online platform that acts as database, an ordering system and just about anything else a lab manager or scientist would want.    

To date, Quartzy has had hundreds of thousands of inventory supplies uploaded by participating scientists (currently near 5,000), has won Innovator of the Year awards and has been covered by the New York Times. “What we’ve found is actually quite interesting,” he says. “People in completely different spaces are using this site.” The site he says is intended for the life sciences labs all over the country, but even places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art use it to keep track of inventory of chemicals used for conservation. The software is free to scientists and always will be, he says, and already people in the biotechnology sector are using it. He hopes others working on the next great bug or advanced catalysis system will check it out, Regelmann says. Why not, considering Quartzy can “make things faster for scientists” and “put a method to the madness.”  —Luke Geiver