The eleventh annual gathering of the ELIXIR community was hosted by ELIXIR Greece in the historic city of Thessaloniki. Between 2-5 June, ELIXIR All Hands 2025 brought together over 400 attendees from ELIXIR’s 22 Nodes, along with a selection of international guests.
The four-day meeting offered a selection of parallel sessions to share successes and address challenges faced during the first 18 months of the ELIXIR Scientific Programme 2024-28. There were two plenaries, on global collaboration and Node operations, and two keynotes, from Naveed Aziz, Genome Canada and Irene Papatheodorou, ELIXIR UK, along with nine mini-symposia and 25 workshops. Attendees were welcomed by Stavros Kalafatis, Deputy Minister of Development, who delivered the opening address on behalf of the Greek government.
Collaboration emerged as one of the key themes of the meeting. In the first keynote, Naveed Aziz, Vice President Research and Innovation at Genome Canada, presented Canada’s genomics strategy for collaboration through shared data. He emphasised the importance of research data sharing, a principle uniting ELIXIR and Genome Canada, and outlined collaboration opportunities through the Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (FEGA) and Horizon Europe.
The newly updated ELIXIR International Strategy was presented in the first plenary. The session explored how ELIXIR works collaboratively with European research infrastructures, such as Euro-BioImaging, Instruct-ERIC, and ways to deepen collaborations with other global regions. The second plenary focused on the collaboration and connection between ELIXIR Nodes, with presentations from Node, Technical and Training Coordinators and a selection of multi-Node services.
A highlight of the meeting was the genuinely hands-on nature of the workshops. Selected through a competitive process, the sessions were designed to make the most of the in-person format by encouraging active participation from all attendees. As a result, the 25 workshops generated a variety of concrete outputs, ranging from consultation summaries to actionable plans. The only complaint was the impossibility of attending more than one workshop at a time.
Irene Papatheodorou, Head of Data Science at Earlham Institute, gave the closing keynote offering insights into decoding phenotypes at the cell type level. She presented examples of how open data enables the research community to tackle different scientific problems, from understanding cross-species cell types to identifying disease cell types. She encouraged ELIXIR to continue the work on sustaining good standards, interoperable tools and FAIR data, which are essential to the success of her research.
We look forward to meeting again at All Hands 2026 in Lyon, France.