The beautiful Portuguese city of Coimbra welcomed the European light microscopy community for ELMI 2026, and German BioImaging (GerBI) was there in full force! From poster presentations and invited talks to community sessions and industry networking, it was an action-packed and truly inspiring week. Here is a look back at everything we got up to.

Co-Organizing the Core Facility Day

GerBI played an active role in co-organizing the Core Facility (CF) Day, one of the most community-driven and practically oriented parts of the ELMI programme. Core facility professionals from across Europe came together to exchange experiences, challenges, and solutions – exactly the kind of peer-to-peer knowledge exchange that GerBI champions.

Janina Hanne, together with Roland Nitschke and Mariana Carvalho, hosted a dedicated session on Core Facility Tools, guiding participants through the landscape of software and workflow solutions that help core facilities run more efficiently, serve their users better, and keep data organized and accessible. The session also featured two contributions from the GerBI community: Lisa-Marie Schaefer was invited to give her talk on survey design (more on that below), and Christian Schmidt presented NFDI4BIOIMAGE and showed how BAND, a remote desktop solution for bioimage analysis, can contribute to CF life.

Talk: Lisa-Marie Schaefer – Survey Design: A Psychologist’s Perspective

Lisa’s talk on survey design for core facilities brought a refreshingly rigorous perspective to a topic many of us deal with daily but rarely think about systematically: how do you actually design a survey that gives you meaningful data? From question wording and response scales to avoiding bias and ensuring interpretability of results, she walked the audience through the key principles of good survey methodology and their application in the core facility context. The talk was extremely well received, leading to a lot of questions and follow-up conversations throughout ELMI.

Talk: Johannes Soltwedel – You Can’t Spell AI Without FAIR

Also part of the CF Day, the AI session featured a talk byJohannes Soltwedel with a title that perfectly captures the argument: “You can’t spell AI without FAIR.” The talk explored how FAIR data principles – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable – are not just good data hygiene, but an absolute prerequisite for trustworthy and effective AI in bioimaging. Johannes walked through concrete examples of what can go wrong when training data is poorly documented, inconsistently structured, or simply not reusable: from biased models to results that cannot be reproduced or transferred to new datasets. Good AI starts with good data – and good data starts with FAIR.

Representing GerBI on the Poster Floor

GerBI brought various posters to the conference:

Lisa presented a broad overview of GerBI, introducing our community, mission, and activities to colleagues from across Europe and beyond – a great opportunity to connect with new and familiar faces alike.

Johannes contributed a poster on FAIR data management and OME-Zarr, exploring how GerBI, together with OME, QUAREP-LiMi, and GIDE, is developing interoperable data standards and tools to support FAIR AI-assisted research in microscopy. The poster highlighted how the OME-Zarr file format and OMERO can help researchers track data provenance, validate datasets, and avoid pitfalls such as reproducibility problems and model biases.

GerBI member Max Nobis represented the GerBI Team Intravital Microscopy with their mission to advancing intravital microscopy through collaboration and open science and the opportunity to chat with him about their upcoming event the “6th Day of Intravital Microscopy” in November.

Christa presented a poster on the GloBIAS Workshop, co-organized by GerBI, highlighting the growing international dimension of our community work.

Networking, Industry, and TiM 2027

Beyond the formal programme, ELMI is always one of the best opportunities for community building – and 2026 was no exception. We had great conversations with numerous industry partners, both established GerBI members and potential new ones, discussing collaborations and membership. We also spread the word about the upcoming workshop application deadline for TiM2027. If you are thinking about proposing a workshop, make sure you don’t miss it! More information can be found at trendsinmicroscopy.de.

A Week to Remember

ELMI 2026 in Coimbra reminded us once again why in-person conferences matter. We met members old and new, had energizing discussions, gathered valuable input for GerBI’s ongoing work, and had a fantastic time doing it. A huge thank you to the ELMI organizers, our Portuguese hosts, and everyone who stopped by our posters, attended our sessions, or simply joined us for a coffee and a conversation.

See you at the next one!

Visit us on Zenodo to find the slides of the talks