EBIB Anniversary: We both want to use technology to empower scientists

Interview with Dr. Jan Ellenberg, Preparatory Phase Coordinator of Euro-BioImaging

In 2006 Jan Ellenberg embarked on the long journey to bring Euro-BioImaging onto the ESFRI roadmap, and to set up what would become the leading pan-European research infrastructure for imaging. As the scientific coordinator who conceptualised Euro-BioImaging, he managed to bring all stakeholders to the table. Besides gathering the support from research institutions and ministries across member states, an important milestone was aligning companies in the imaging sector behind the common goal to bring the latest cutting-edge technology to researchers in the Life Sciences and advance the use of imaging.

What was your vision for how industry could and should be involved in supporting and shaping this pan-European research infrastructure?

I think industry is very important here, because Euro-BioImaging is about access to cutting edge technology, and a lot of the new imaging technology these days gets developed and invented inside industry. To make these technologies available earlier, we really need the pro-active involvement of our partners in industry in a broad sense, so that we can more rapidly deploy the latest technologies towards life science and do not have to wait for the final commercialization and final market impact.

How did you align the imaging industry behind the goals and implementation of Euro-BioImaging?

This is about building the trust between the academic partners and the industry partners that creating a common open access infrastructure is of mutual benefit for both sides.

A lot of the early discussions were individual discussions with the CEOs of companies or with the heads of their R&D to get them excited about Euro-BioImaging - about the vision to bring imaging technologies to all of Europe's life scientists, and how that could catalyze a much wider use of imaging technologies in the future, and enable many more discoveries in life science.

Promoting that vision, having buy-in from the people to say: “This is a goal we all want to support” is key at the beginning, and then to go on and actually formalize their engagement and become official members of a board with a common agenda, a common voice. Agreeing to not just work together with the academic partners and friends in Euro-BioImaging, but work together with other companies that might in some areas also be competitors, but still have a bigger, common goal.

How has the involvement and collaboration of the Euro-BioImaging Industry Board impacted the development and success of the research infrastructure?

I think it has been really important to have the Euro-BioImaging Industry Board as a collaboration partner and as an advisory body in Euro-BioImaging on technology - both in terms of how quickly technology is renewed and upgraded and what are the key priority areas for technology.

Another area to particularly highlight where industry engagement is absolutely critical is training, because the training of the scientists at the instruments, in the imaging facilities, doesn't really work without support from the industry partners

A third area to mention is to jointly lobby with the funding organizations of the research infrastructure. Convince them both at the national but also at the European level to invest in joint partnerships between academic infrastructure and industry partners, and to promote this joint development also from the funder’s side. This is a longer term effort, but also already starting to bear fruit - we can see in Euro-BioImaging several projects now where industry partners are involved in EC projects and where they deliver alongside the academic partners to new innovation and new service activities.

What are some of the unique ways that Euro-BioImaging has facilitated knowledge exchange, technology transfer, and other forms of collaboration between the research community and industry partners?

Euro-BioImaging really engages in knowledge and technology transfer with industry across the whole infrastructure. One very concrete way are the many training activities in Euro-BioImaging that revolve around instrumentation that often comes from industry partners. Here we really involve our colleagues from industry in the training, in bringing new knowledge to the users, for the life scientists to be able to use these technologies in their research.

But this is not a one way street where we get knowledge from industry experts, but it also works the other way around. We expose the industry partners to the needs of the life scientists and to the new applications in research that they have - applications that maybe the commercial generation of instruments that we have now is not able yet to support as much as it should. And that gives rise then to new developments and technology on the industry side, so that it is really a very valuable two-way exchange.

Looking at the research infrastructure landscape, how can the Euro-BioImaging Industry Board act as a blueprint for interaction of academic technology developers and service providers with industry?

Euro-BioImaging can be very proud of its Industry Board. It is one of the infrastructures that had such a board from the very beginning that provided a forum where non-competitive interactions between companies could be discussed where a common agenda and strategy could be formulated, which is so valuable for this sector of industry.

I think other infrastructures actually envy Euro-BioImaging for having such a board and having set up such a system which works - welcoming new companies, collaborative. It is clearly not about competition, but rather about common goals and long-term strategies. The EBIB provides a really good example for how to organize this and how to govern it by industry itself, but nevertheless closely tied to the infrastructure and in regular exchange.

I would hope that other research infrastructures, for example data science or IT, could set up something like that in the future because it is so valuable. A lot of the new technology and innovation happens in companies and in industry, and we should link these sectors with each other.

Were there any particularly memorable personal interactions that stand out from the early days of Euro-BioImaging?

There were many very exciting personal interactions, and it's hard to name just a few.

What is possibly a common thread is that in my job in setting up Euro-BioImaging, I visited many different imaging facilities across the globe, sometimes together with representatives from industry, such as the first EBIB chair Christoph Thumser or recently our current chair Herbert Schaden.

Both are in senior positions in their respective companies, but seeing how excited they are about what technology can do for science is so motivating. You realize that in industry, people in the end want to do the same that we want to do in academic technology development – empowering researchers to study for example a strange species in an different environment or work on research problems that nobody in Europe would ever think about.

These personal joint experiences were really, I think, very, very rewarding, but also maybe convinced both Christoph and Herbert to go the extra mile to take on this responsibility as chair of the board, spend time on it and move it forward. And I think we couldn't have had better people that are so passionate about technologies and making them work for science.