Each year, Canadian Blood Services’ BloodTechNet award program supports innovative educational projects within the transfusion, cellular therapy and transplantation communities that can deliver educational tools and resources to health professionals in Canada. One successful project aimed to facilitate laboratory rotations for directors in-training of histocompatibility and immunogenetics laboratories whose highly specialized expertise in human leukocyte antigen (HLA) testing supports transplant and platelet transfusion activities throughout Canada. Collaborators on the project included

The constant whirring and buzz of a research lab is jarring at first, but it eventually becomes a comforting white noise. The machines making the noise are, after all, the same machines that provide many of the intriguing results and unique observations in scientific experiments. “These are our centrifuges, this is the spectrophotometer, that's the LORCA, the hemox analyzer sits over there…”. At first, I hardly knew what the words in the names of these seemingly complicated technologies meant. What I did know about those machines though, was that they would be crucial tools that I would