Agilent Technologies, a US-based manufacturer of laboratory instruments, is to open a ‘state of the art’ R&D facility at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

The new Agilent (www.agilent.com) site will serve as a major research hub for laser spectroscopy; it will also incorporate Agilent’s Raman spectroscopy business, formerly known as Cobalt Light Systems before it was acquired by Agilent in 2017.

The company is focusing its investment in two main areas: R&D to enable customers to perform better science; and streamlining existing product lines ‘to ensure an optimal customer experience’.

The site will also accommodate the company’s Laser Spectroscopy Centre of Excellence (LSCE), focusing on R&D in the field of vibrational spectroscopy.

The Harwell Campus spans 710 acres (south of Oxford), and is a well-known cluster for science and innovation. It is home to over 200 organisations (public, private and academic), 6,000 people and £2 billion of large-scale national science infrastructure.

The Harwell Campus is where Agilent’s proprietary Raman technologies were originally developed by Pavel Matousek and his colleagues at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; it is also where Cobalt Light Systems was established.

Professor Matousek, a senior fellow at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Central Laser Facility, said: “I’m proud to see Agilent, and the Raman business we helped to establish, growing strongly and returning to Harwell.

"The new Agilent facility is perfectly located for collaboration between Agilent’s spectroscopy businesses and the large number of scientists and engineers we have at Harwell.

"I very much look forward to our future joint endeavours.”

Agilent UK employs more than 480 people in the UK — in manufacturing, sales and service — and has two manufacturing sites in Shropshire producing liquid chromatography columns, silica and polymeric particles, magnetic beads for the clinical and diagnostic industry, and instruments for gel permeation chromatography.

Agilent generated revenues of $4.91 billion in 2018 and employs 15,500 people world-wide.