Bernadette Storey-Laubach was trained as a bench scientist, but she’s traded a lab stand and clamps for a toolbox and wrench as CAS’s Jill of all trades.

“You never know when something will need to be fixed,” she says with a smile.

The organic chemist is instrumental in supporting operations and research in a dozen CAS facilities that crisscross campus and academic disciplines, including the 95,000-square-foot Hall of Science.

The building is home to researchers from the biology, environmental science, chemistry, and neuroscience departments, including 32 faculty and hundreds of students. The Hall of Science includes nine core facilities with shared equipment like the quantitative polymerase chain reaction instrument, a gas chromatography–mass spectrometer, and countless microscopes and test tubes.

Storey-Laubach supports it all, running to the basement to retrieve nitrogen tanks, fixing a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, leading tours of the facilities, and offering a word of encouragement—or a piece of chocolate from the emergency stash in her desk.

“The research is driven by our faculty, and the engine is the students,” she says. “My job is to make sure that they have the space and resources they need to do the work. It’s just problem-solving.”

Storey-Laubach joined AU part-time when her husband, neuroscience professor Mark Laubach, was recruited by the university in 2014. “I love being at AU,” she says. “This place feels very personal to me.”

She found her niche in science after earning her master’s from Wake Forest University and joining a small start-up. Out of necessity, she managed every facet of the research process—from drafting safety guidelines to navigating the supply chain—and discovered she loved it.

“I went into grad school thinking I wanted to teach chemistry,” Storey-Laubach says. “Working at a start-up—[where] you pitch in and do everything—opened my eyes to what [else] you can do with a science degree.” 

Chemistry professor Santiago Toledo says research in the Hall of Science, which was key to AU earning R1 status from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education in February 2025, couldn’t happen without Storey-Laubach. 

“She’s very aware that downtime in research can be detrimental to experiments, so she makes sure we have [as few] disruptions as possible,” Toledo says. “She’s become my go-to person for everything.” 

That’s because Storey-Laubach knows we R1 AU.