The University of Pisa, through the Department of Physics, has joined the Italian Node of the newly launched ERIC, an important research infrastructure which offers researchers access to state-of-the-art resources and services in biological and biomedical research. The European Commission has, in fact, formally established Euro-BioImaging, the open gateway to excellence in the field of imaging of which the University of Pisa is part and which will be managed by the University of Turin, as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).
Euro-BioImaging provides life science researchers with access to a broad range of imaging instruments and the relative expertise, as well as training opportunities and management services that are not available at their home institutions or among their collaboration partners. All scientists, regardless of their affiliation, area of expertise or field of activity, can benefit from these pan-European open access services. Euro-BioImaging will ensure excellent research and development across the life sciences in Europe. All Euro-BioImaging services are accessible via www.eurobioimaging.eu. Establishment of the Euro-BioImaging ERIC is the culmination of over 10 years of preparatory work with the active engagement of 25 national imaging communities, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
Finland will host the Statutory Seat of the ERIC, and manage the access gateway and overall coordination of Euro-BioImaging, while EMBL will coordinate access to biological imaging and Italy will coordinate access to biomedical imaging through the CNR University of Turin Unit of the Institute of Biostructure and Bioimaging. EMBL will also coordinate Euro-BioImaging’s data services via the BioImage Archive, the platform for storing and sharing imaging data.
Euro-BioImaging offers state-of-the-art imaging services through its internationally renowned facilities, called Nodes. These Nodes are distributed across its 15 founding members: Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, EMBL, Finland, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the UK. Belgium will participate as an observer.
“Our University participates in activities of the Italian Node for biomedical imaging in close collaboration with the CNR Institute of Clinical Physiology in Pisa and the ‘G. Monasterio’ Foundation,” explains Nicola Belcari, PhD, associate professor of the Department of Physics ‘E. Fermi’ (on the left in the photograph). “Our Department is at present the Department most strongly involved in the network as it has provided the Node with the nuclear imaging technologies developed by the Medical Physics Group. The establishment of Euro BioImaging as an ERIC will pave the way to new possibilities of funding, but above all it will strengthen, at both national and international level, the bioimaging community which is of a highly multidisciplinary nature including as it does, biologists, chemists, physicists, doctors, pharmacologists, engineers and IT specialists.”
Both the Italian Ministry for Research and University (MIUR) and the National Research Council (CNR) have expressed their satisfaction for this important achievement.