How can Research Infrastructures help scientists?

On Tuesday, 23rd April, the Finnish Euro-BioImaging Nodes organized an educational workshop to raise awareness of research infrastructures. The event entitled “How can research infrastructures help scientists?” featured success stories of academic users that benefited from services of both Finnish Euro-BioImaging Nodes. A good example of potential outreach event to raise awareness about open access to imaging infrastructures within a local research community. 

Despite surprising  weather conditions that covered the whole Southwest Finland with snow and paralyzed road traffic, a decent number of attendees from the local imaging community arrived to the auditorium in BioCity Turku.

The workshop started with a general presentation given by Jiri Funda, Project Manager from the Euro-BioImaging Seat, who was invited to emphasize how academic researchers can benefit from Euro-BioImaging services. Three encouraging stories from Euro-BioImaging users followed.

The first one, featuring a global collaboration between Finnish Advanced Microscopy Node (FiAM) and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, was presented by Felipe Del Valle Batalla who worked in Turku in the lab of Pieta Mattila on the role of endolysosomal vesicles in B cell activation.

Another presentation showcased joint work of FiAM, Finnish Biomedical Imaging Node and the Charles University in Prague, which was supported by the ISIDORe project. This joint endeavor utilized PET imaging autoradiography data and created an open source tool for image analysis, the Mouse Brain Alignment Tool. The project was presented by Zuzana Čočková from Prague and Junel Solis from Turku BioImaging (TBI). Full story here.

The third user story was presented by Juho-Antti Mäkelä from the University of Turku whose team with the help of TBI developed a novel neural network-based approach for automated histological analyses, the STAGETOOL. Watch the video about STAGETOOL from our recent User Forum.

The last talk of the workshop was given by the FiAM Node Manager, Irina Belaia, who familiarized the audience with Euro-BioImaging projects that offer funding for user access, namely the ISIDORe, canSERV and AgroSERV projects.

A casual networking event followed the presentations, where the hosts and attendees discussed imaging topics as well as the snowy  weather conditions.