CTLS2025 meeting – Putting Core Facility experts in the spotlight

CTLS (Core Technologies for Life Sciences) is an association bringing together core facility administrators, managers, researchers, and professionals across all different life science technology domains and institutions across Europe. Every two years, the CTLS community comes together for a meeting. CTLS2025 was held in Brno, organised by the CEITEC team. Johanna Bischof represented the Euro-BioImaging team at this event, and shared her impressions below. 

The CTLS programme featured many topics of interest for core facility staff – from training, open science and industry engagement, to innovation management and cross-facility collaboration. An important discussion area was around how the visibility of core facilities and the recognition of their impact within their institutions can be increased. Facility staff from different institutions around Europe shared their strategies, including through the closer integration of core facilities with different specialisations under one overarching management and platform, increasing their representation in institutional structures, professionalising processes, and reducing admin burdens within individual facilities. 

Strong representation of the Euro-BioImaging community

Although CTLS is a cross-technology meeting, imaging and the Euro-BioImaging community were very well-represented. The Euro-BioImaging Hub team was represented by Johanna Bischof, Head of Bio-Hub operations, who shared strategies for success of complex cross-facility user projects and the support needed for these. Many Euro-BioImaging Node representatives also attneded the meeting and were actively involved in the program as presenters and session chairs, including Nodes from NMI Sweden, PPBI, Flanders BioImaging, Prague Node, Brno Node, Austria BioImaging, and Barcelona Node.

In addition to the meetings, CTLS also provides training opportunities and opportunities for connection via various Working Groups for their members. 

Strengthening core facilities

Having a community, such as that fostered by CTLS, is very important for core facility staff: it allows them to share expertise and support each other. Even as core facilities grow and increase in importance across institutions, they still needing constant advocacy and lobbying, in an ever changing and challenging funding environment. CTLS provides a way to support core facility staff that are working by themselves within their facility or within institutions where core facilities are not yet so firmly integrated into systems and recognition. It also allows the sharing of expertise and developments from one domain of core facilities to others. For instance, the Global BioImaging international recommendations, while targetted at Imaging Core Facilities, feature many aspects that can be translated to other core facility communities.

Group photo, CTLS 2025. Photo by CTLS (https://www.ctls2025.com/photo-gallery/)

Panel discussion at CTLS in Brno. Gleb Grebnev (left) represented Global BioImaging and Johanna Bischof (centre right) represented Euro-BioImaging. Photo by Luisa Cortes.