SciLifeLab infrastructure community gathered at Facility Forum

On October 17 and 18, some 360 participants from the SciLifeLab infrastructure community, gathered for an intense two-day meeting with the aim to promote cross-platform and cross-unit interactions and enable discussions on topics related to infrastructure operations.

This was the third Facility Forum, the previous events were arranged in 2017 and 2019, and thus the first since the pandemic.

“With Facility Forum, we get a chance to meet and network across platforms, sites, and University affiliations. The emphasis is to facilitate and promote the interaction between staff scientists within the entire SciLifeLab infrastructure to find new connections and ultimately further strengthen SciLifeLab’ s integrated research capabilities”, says Annika Jenmalm Jensen, Infrastructure Director, SciLifeLab.

The first day of the meeting had the format of a talk show hosted by Charlotte Stadler, Platform Co-Director, Spatial and Single Cell Biology, and Björn Nystedt, Co-Director of the SciLifeLab Bioinformatics platform, with guests from management, infrastructure platforms, capabilities, and support functions.

The well-visited poster session after lunch displayed 30 posters from SciLifeLab sites and platforms, Technology Development Projects, Operations Office, and Data Centre.

“During the poster session, I had the chance to explain what we do, which is morphological profiling using cell painting, which is a technique that is gaining momentum due to its high potential to aid mode of action identification of a given compound. During the session, I had very interesting conversations that turned into at least two potential new collaborations, which I am very much looking forward to exploring, says Jordi Carreras-Puigvert, Head of unit (CBCS – Uppsala node) and Associate professor at the department of Pharmaceutical biosciences Uppsala University.

In the afternoon, participants chose between seven workshops focusing on:

• SciLifeLab Training Hub
• How do you reach out? – Improve your communication skills
• How to serve academic vs non-academic infrastructure users and the work towards harmonized SciLifeLab models
• IT and data management services for SciLifeLab infrastructure
• Precision medicine at SciLifeLab
• Quality aspects of infrastructure operations, data handling and scientific output
• Planetary Biology – understanding ecosystems from molecular toplanetary scale

Day two was dedicated to a platform-wise program, where each platform got an opportunity to dig deeper into best practices and develop an even stronger platform.

“SciLifeLab infrastructure is such a strong community, and it was clear from the two days of Facility Forum that this type of dedicated meeting places and opportunities for cross-platform activities and networking is needed and highly appreciated”, says Lars Johansson, Infrastructure Coordinator, SciLifeLab.