When she’s not in the lab, Laura Bauer, a research specialist in agriculture, plays with a local concert band and repairs musical instruments. Bauer earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Illinois and worked as a quality-control chemist for a Champaign manufacturing plant before joining the Illinois staff in July 1990.
Tell me a little about your job.
This is a nutrition lab, so we analyze pretty much whatever might be fed to an animal or a human and what they’d put out: food or feed ingredients, blood, urine. It can be rather smelly in here sometimes. My official title is research specialist in agriculture, but in generic terms it’s lab tech. I work for three professors. I run their labs, make certain their students have supplies, develop lab procedures and run lab samples. I work out new assays for our lab. I fix and repair equipment and make the simpler equipment that we need. This job is really kind of an odd thing: You have to be a jack-of-all-trades.
Why do you say jack-of-all-trades?
Some of our equipment at this point might be 40 years old. To replace it would be $2,000 but if you know how to handle a screwdriver and know a little bit about electrical work, you can fix it for $100. I can actually keep the older equipment running longer, and when a professor does have money for new equipment, we can get something we’ve never had before. A lot of people who get into technician jobs don’t realize how important the mechanical skills are: You can’t just call someone to come fix a piece of equipment because it’s so specialized.
What’s the most challenging part of what you do?
That would be a toss-up between teaching a student how to run an assay – so they understand why they’re doing something versus just going through by rote – and developing the new procedures for our labs. We’ll see a new procedure in print and try it out but then we have to adapt it to our sample types so we can use it for a real-world application.
What kinds of things do you do in your free time?
I read fiction, nonfiction, whatever catches my eye. I do embroidery, crotchet and cross-stitch. I do woodworking: cabinets, tables, that type of thing. I have furniture in my house made by four generations of my family. I have two stepped end tables made by my great-grandfather and a bunch of picture frames and wall decorations he made. I have a room divider made by my grandfather as well as towel holders, bowls, my rolling pin and my spice rack. My father made my coffee table. I made a set of recycling bins and bathroom cabinets.
What woodworking projects do you have in progress?
I’m putting together a wardrobe. I inherited my grandfather’s tools when he died because I was the only one left in the family who did woodworking. I have a little workshop set up in my basement.
What musical instruments do you play?
I play the lower clarinet and the saxophone. I also substitute teach private lessons for those instruments. I also repair instruments. I’m a music librarian for [and play in] the Mark Foutch Brass Band. They’re a traditional concert band: They’re heavy on the marches. We play a lot at Hessel Park, Rantoul, Villa Grove, Paxton.
Have you played with other groups?
I played a couple of times with the Parkland College band. I played with the old Jaycee band. My instruments are more specialized, so I get calls to come in and play one piece. I played recently with the new music program over at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
How did you get started repairing instruments?
The lower clarinets are more complicated than the regular clarinets. They’re more mechanical: You press one key and there may be five cross-connections where it hits another key and shuts the pad. There are very few people who know how to fix them. Basically, in self-defense I had to learn how to find the problems and what needed to be fixed in order to tell the repair person about it. It finally just became easier for me to fix it myself than to take it to somebody else. If a parent calls me asking me to repair their child’s instrument and it’s not something I think I can do, I will send them to someone else rather than risk damaging someone’s instrument.
