Spanish and Portuguese Microscopy Communities meet in Toledo

The Annual SPAOM meeting - the Spanish and Portuguese Advanced Optical Microscopy Meeting - took place in November 2024 in Toledo, Spain. The meeting brought together many members of both local communities and international partners for 3 days of great talks, community workshops, presentations of new technical innovations, and discussions. Highlights include the many workshops, a fantastic roundtable discussion on Core Facility Management chaired by Nuno Moreno, and a keynote lecture by Georgina Fletcher of BioImagingUK, highlighting international collaboration and imaging communities. Head of Euro-BioImaging Bio-Hub Operations, Johanna Bischof, attended the event and shares her insights below. 

SPAOM is the Annual Meeting of the Portuguese imaging community, and the Spanish imaging community, organised respectively within PPBI (Portuguese Platform for Biomedical Imaging), and Red Española de Microscopía Óptica Avanzada (REMOA). They have organised a joint annual meeting, characterised by a highly collaborative atmosphere and community participation, for eight years running.The 2024 edition of SPAOM was no exception. 

The meeting featured many great talks highlighting the latest advances in microscopy and image analysis - and in a recognition of evolving technical and application standards - these were not limited to just optical microscopy as the meeting title may suggest. The program also included a dedicated session on correlative imaging including Electron Microscopy and X-Ray imaging.

Another hallmark of SPAOM are its many workshops - both from industry partners on their latest innovations, but also many practical hands-on workshops from the community for the community. This year,topics included live cell imaging, quality control, Open Hardware, and an introduction to AI4Life and the BioImage Model zoo [links] and were met with much enthusiasm from the attendees.

The active discussions sparked by the workshops continued in the lively poster sessions and in a fantastic roundtable discussion on Core Facility Management, chaired by Nuno Moreno.

The Core Facility Management roundtable broached many relevant questions from quality management of instruments, working with users, career paths for imaging scientists in core facilities, and data management. The audience gave their input via online polls and contributed to an active discussion that revealed many evergreen topics and challenges for facility managers.

Imaging communities were very actively present in the meeting. SPAOM2024 invited as its partner community BioImagingUK, represented by Georgina Fletcher, who gave a keynote lecture highlighting community building initiatives from BioImagingUK and the RMS as an introduction to a session presenting communities, infrastructures, and networks at all scales - from the national networks PPBI and REMOA, to European Microscopy Society, Euro-BioImaging and Global BioImaging.

“It is always great to be able to present Euro-BioImaging and Global BioImaging at these community meetings. But it’s almost better to see the direct connections and collaborations between our different national communities, such as here at SPAOM with the featured community being BioImagingUK, and multiple representatives from our Flanders Node presenting their work.” says Johanna Bischof, Head of Bio-Hub operations.

SPAOM will continue in 2025 with a meeting in Braga, Portugal, from November 5-7 and we are already looking forward to it.