SciLifeLab Day Gothenburg: A Successful Kick-off for the First of Four National Site Visits

The SciLifeLab Day Gothenburg 2023 was a successful event, providing valuable insights into the services and capabilities offered by SciLifeLab, nationally and locally. It showcased the research achievements of the Gothenburg Site through user success stories, and highlighted the critical role of SciLifeLab in advancing technology- and data-driven life science in Sweden.

On April 17, 2023, the Gothenburg Site of SciLifeLab welcomed researchers from Gothenburg and beyond to an exciting kick-off event. Held at the Wallenberg Conference Centre, the SciLifeLab Day Gothenburg was a day filled with informative presentations, engaging discussions, and opportunities to learn about the services and capabilities offered by SciLifeLab, both nationally and locally.

The event began with welcoming words from Carina Mallard, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Gothenburg. Olli Kallioniemi, Director of SciLifeLab, provided an overview of SciLifeLab and technology- and data-driven life science, setting the stage for the day’s activities. Annika Jenmalm Jensen, Infrastructure Director of SciLifeLab, spoke about the SciLifeLab infrastructure in the overall landscape of Sweden, highlighting the critical role of Gothenburg Site in the national network. Maria Smedh and Elisabet Carlsohn, Site Coordinator and Site Director for Site Gothenburg also held a presentation of the site as a whole.

“Today we have the SciLifeLab Day here in Gothenburg, it’s like a kick-off for this Site. There are four new sites at SciLifeLab and the others will have their kick-off during the autumn, so we are first here in Gothenburg! This is a way to show the local research community all aspects of SciLifeLab”, says Maria Smedh.

During the first part of the day five separate user success stories were presented by users of the SciLifeLab infrastructure from the University of Gothenburg. Presentations were also held about SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS) as well as SciLifeLab’s training program, in order to provide local users with more information regarding the nation-wide infrastructure that SciLifeLab provides.

“One of the challenges that we have had here in Gothenburg is that a lot of people consider SciLifeLab a Stockholm and Uppsala thing. This is something that we really need to communicate as we both have a lot of SciLifeLab activities here locally, and our local researchers can also use the national resources anywhere in Sweden”, says Maria Smedh.

In addition to the main program, the event also featured parallel sessions focused on the capabilities offered by SciLifeLab, including Pandemic Laboratory Preparedness, Planetary Biology, and Precision Medicine. These sessions provided researchers with in-depth insights into the advanced technologies and services available through SciLifeLab. Finally, the program concluded with a well-visited exhibition and poster session where researchers had the opportunity to showcase their work and engage with infrastructure experts to explore how they could implement SciLifeLab’s advanced technologies in their research.