Latvia Joins European Bioinformatics Leaders at the 11th ELIXIR All Hands Meeting
From 2 to 5 June 2025, the 11th annual All Hands Meeting of ELIXIR – the European life sciences infrastructure for biological information – took place in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Source: elixir-europe.org/events/elixir-all-hands-2025
This flagship event brings together representatives from all ELIXIR Nodes, along with partners from academia and industry across Europe. . It serves as a key platform to discuss recent achievements, shape future strategies, and strengthen community-wide synergies across all areas of ELIXIR’s activity.
This year’s ELIXIR All Hands programme was shaped through broad community engagement, integrating proposals from ELIXIR’s Platforms, Communities, Focus Groups, and Node-level technical and training coordinators.
A central part of the programme was occupied by plenary sessions, featuring addresses from ELIXIR leadership and internationally recognised experts. These sessions outlined the consortium’s principal directions of development and highlighted opportunities for global collaboration, underscoring ELIXIR’s future role within the European research landscape.
The programme continued with more than twenty thematic workshops addressing key topics for ELIXIR, ranging from data integration through artificial intelligence and knowledge graphs to sustainable research software management, digital twin infrastructure, and the processing of sensitive health data in the cloud. These sessions focused on developing practical solutions, improving reproducibility, and strengthening ELIXIR’s service and knowledge ecosystem in line with the goals of its Scientific Programme.
High-level mini symposia complemented the programme, covering strategic and interdisciplinary topics such as cross-border access to human genome data, the availability of FAIR data and training, the development of Nodes and human resources, and the application of AI and ontologies in molecular research. These sessions provided space for in-depth policy and infrastructure discussions, fostering community engagement and the definition of ELIXIR’s long-term strategic trajectory.
Participants also had the opportunity to explore two dynamic poster sessions, featuring 97 current projects. These showcased a diverse and thematically coherent range of initiatives, with a strong focus on digital infrastructures, research software quality, the FAIR principles, metadata standardisation, impact assessment, performance metrics, and cultural change in the management of research outputs—highlighting ELIXIR’s evolving role as both a technical and community catalyst for life sciences research infrastructures in Europe.
This year, Latvia was represented at the event by two delegates (pictured) from Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU), attending under the project RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme (Project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014), aimed at fostering Latvia’s integration into the ELIXIR infrastructure..
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