Event info:
For the first week of June 2025, I was at the ELIXIR All Hands meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental European life sciences infrastructure with members from over 240 research institutes in 21 countries. All Hands is an annual event bringing together members of the ELIXIR community and partner organisations from across Europe to review ELIXIR’s achievements, ongoing activities and future plans.
This year was the 11th annual meeting - my 3rd All Hands. The event was full of opportunities to build networks and community, as well as learn about inter/national successes and challenges to anything life science infrastructure related. I was also there as a participant in the second cohort of ELEAD, ELIXIR’s leadership and diversity mentoring programme to support women’s leadership growth in ELIXIR.
Pre-All Hands:
I flew to Thessaloniki early to attend a networking dinner and peer-mentoring workshop as part of the ELEAD programme. This was the first time our ELEAD cohort met in person, along with the ELEAD programme team and our trainer, Louise Schubert. We had a lovely dinner on the Sunday evening, full of good food and positive connections with my female colleagues.
The next morning, we were all up bright and early for our workshop. Starting with an introduction to peer mentoring and how it is set up for ELEAD, we formed our peer mentoring groups, an essential part of ELEAD. Throughout the programme we meet regularly in our groups to reflect on our own professional practice and support each other through career successes and challenges. It’s a very rewarding part of ELEAD and I felt right at home with the rest of my group - being honest about things we have been finding difficult at work quickly brought us close together, and I left the workshop feeling a lot of inspiration and gratitude.
All Hands:
Day 1:
Then it was time for the main event! Which importantly started with lunch.
As always, the first session was opening remarks from the host node (Greece) followed by a keynote from Naveed Aziz, Vice President of R&I at Genome Canada, who covered infrastructure and governance similarities between EU and Canada and an interesting overview of the past 25 years of Genome Canada.
After a coffee break, it was time for the first parallel sessions. I went to the mini-symposium on Cross-border Access to Human Genomes and Linked Data at Scale. This session covered advances in European genomic data infrastructure, including federated infrastructure and its practical barriers, and a walk through of how ELIXIR is involved with the European Cancer Mission, before ending with a panel discussion. The day ended with a very busy poster session and welcome drinks at the venue.
Day 2
The second day kicked off with 2 back to back parallel workshop sessions. I first attended the workshop on Enhancing RDM Resources led by the ELIXIR RDM community. After a brief introduction, we discussed various RDM topics, from incentives, physical data needs, and RDM training for overlooked professions.
Then I went to the workshop led by the ELIXIR Cancer Data community, Trends in Services for Cancer Research. Here I learnt a lot about cancer data (I work with musculoskeletal data but we covered a lot of relevant topics such as multi-omic data integration), as well as standards such as DOME for improving trust in AI.
There was then a 90-minute lunch & networking break - a great chance to catch up with international colleagues and have a more in-depth look at the posters when it’s less crowded. It was then time for the second plenary, Global Collaborations: Perspectives from Research Infrastructures, with representatives from Euro-BioImaging, Instruct-ERIC, and the ELIXIR Staff Exchange and Global Engagement initiatives. One set of flash talks and fascinating panel discussion later, I had a much better idea of the achievements, challenges, and opportunities that come with large international collaborations.
Another coffee break, then the final parallel session of the day - 3 mini-symposia on biodiversity data, empowering knowledge sharing, and node and people development. I skipped this session - it had been an intense 2 days so far and I needed a break if I was going to make it to the end! The evening ended with the ELIXIR-UK node dinner, unsurprisingly as we’re in Greece there was amazing food, a great chance to catch-up with UK colleagues.
Day 3
It was again a jam packed day of workshops, a plenary, and symposia. First, I went to the ELEAD workshop where we heard about other leadership initiatives for women in infrastructure in Europe and beyond, before a very interactive session mapping all initiatives we knew of and reflecting on which ideas could be useful for us to put into practice.
Then I sat in the ELIXIR & EOSC workshop, an important and exciting discussion around the future development of EOSC nodes, how they’re structured and linked with ELIXIR, and how to stay up to date on EOSC developments and strategy. I came away with more knowledge of EOSC than the year before but still a bit confused - initiatives as big as EOSC are hard to get your head around!
There was then a long lunch/networking session, where I met my ELEAD mentor for the first time. Another key part of ELEAD is being paired with a senior mentor to support your career development - it was exciting to finally meet each other and start this process. There was another plenary on ELIXIR Node Roles, Services, and Connections, an informative session from the ELIXIR Hub and several national nodes on the different node coordinator roles and how the nodes and ELIXIR hub interact and engage on various projects and services.
The final session of the day I went to was on Federated Service Delivery: Enabling Sensitive Data Computing in ELIXIR, covering the complex additional needs of sensitive data, what projects are working on this in ELIXIR, other domains we can learn from (e.g. climate data), ending with a discussion on all the above and what is needed to federate compute services in ELIXIR.
The day didn’t end there! That evening was the conference dinner at another venue in Thessaloniki. We had a nice drinks reception overlooking the sea before heading inside for a delicious meal accompanied by a fantastic display of traditional Greek dancing and music.
Day 4
The final day had sadly arrived. Again, it kicked off with parallel workshop sessions - I went to a very engaging workshop on Data Annotation and Representation delivered by colleagues from the University of Nottingham. After a brief introduction to the workshop, we were split into two teams, debate style, to argue for or against the contentious statement: “All annotated datasets are unreliable”. We had a lot of interesting discussions in our teams before a fun debate at the end.
A quick pit-stop for coffee and then the closing plenary session. Irene Papatheodorou gave an insightful talk on her work on phenotypes at the Earlham Institute, and then we heard an overview of ELIXIR’s 2026 plans before poster prizes were awarded. The session ended with the most anticipated slide of the meeting, where is next year’s All Hands? [Drum roll] Lyon, France!
Lunch was a final chance to say goodbye to colleagues before heading back home. It was a fantastic All Hands as always, and although I was very exhausted from an intense 4 days of networking and new information, I left feeling very connected, inspired, and full of ideas. Until next year.
Slides, posters, and an event report from ELIXIR All Hands 2025 are available to all.
Thank you to the Software Sustainability Institute for funding my accommodation for this meeting.