News
2026
19th OME 2026 Community Meeting
Join us for the 19th Open Microscopy Environment (OME) Community Meeting from 28. – 30.04.2026, in the Haus der Universität Düsseldorf. Registration is open now!
Workshop: Research Data Management for Microscopy, 20. and 23. April 2026
This hands-on workshop at the University of Münster is aimed at researchers who want to strengthen their skills in research data management (RDM). Good data management practices make imaging data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – in line with the FAIR principles. Register now!
2025
Workshop: Research Data Management for Microscopy
This hands-on workshop is aimed at researchers who want to strengthen their skills in research data management (RDM). Good data management practices make imaging data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – in line with the FAIR principles.
#Meet our Data stewards: Maximilian Müller
In our social media campaign, ‚Meet the Data Stewards‘, we introduce one member of our NFDI4BIOIMAGE Data Steward Team every month. This month, we are introducing Maximilian Müller, who works at at the University of Konstanz.
RDM4Mic Meeting
The next RDM4Mic meeting takes place from October 21st to 23rd in Münster. Registration is open til October 1st.
This meeting is intended for:
- RDM practitioners and enthusiasts in microscopy
- Core facility staff and bioimage analysts
- Researchers interested in data sharing, metadata, and FAIR principles
Please find more information here: https://hackmd.io/@marietovelill/RDM4mic2025
#Meet our Data stewards: Mohsen Ahmadi
In our social media campaign, ‚Meet the Data Stewards‘, we introduce one member of our NFDI4BIOIMAGE Data Steward Team every month. This month, we are introducing Mohsen Ahmadi, who works at the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP Greifswald).
#Meet our Data stewards: Vanessa Fuchs
In our social media campaign, ‚Meet the Data Stewards‘, we introduce one member of our NFDI4BIOIMAGE Data Steward Team every month. Find NFDI4BOIMAGE’s social media channels here. This month, we are introducing Vanessa Fuchs, who works at the Center for Advanced Imaging (CAi) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
#Meet our Data stewards: Riccardo Massei
In our social media campaign, ‚Meet the Data Stewards‘, we introduce one member of our NFDI4BIOIMAGE Data Steward Team every month. Find NFDI4BOIMAGE’s social media channels here. This month, we are introducing Riccardo Massei, who works at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung – UFZ in Leipzig.
#Meet our Data stewards: Jens Wendt
The #MeetTheDataSteward series continues with Jens Wendt, who gives us an insight into a help desk request he responded to as a data steward of NFDI4BIOIMAGE, which involved a number of complex tasks.
Trends in Microscopy Data available online
The bioannual Trends in Microscopy Conference offers hands-on workshops using various types of microscopy techniques. The data collected from TiM 2023 and TiM 2025 are now available with rich annotations in OMERO.
#MeetOurDataStewards social media campaign started: Ksenia Kroos
Our Data Stewards are central to NFDI4BIOIMAGE’s Community Support. Get to know them! Our public relations team is launching the #MeetOurDataSteward series on social media to introduce our Data Stewards one by one. The campaign is kicked off with the introduction of Dr. Ksenia Krooß, NFDI4BIOIMAGE Data Steward at the Heinrich Heine University.
NFDI4BIOIMAGE represented at the ICBP 2025 by Rodrigo Escobar
NFDI4BIOIMAGE member Rodrigo Escobar visited the International Conference on BioMedical Photonics to present his work. Find a report on the conference here.
Promoting reproducibility in bioimaging: A Galaxy Tutorial based on an IDR study
Reproducibility is key to research but, at times, challenging without proper resources. Riccardo Massei produced an open Galaxy tutorial demonstrating how to build reproducible 2D-spot detection for smFISH.
Keynote and workshop at the Helmholtz Imaging Conference
We’re excited about the upcoming Helmholtz Imaging Conference in Potsdam, taking place from June 25th to 27th. Our Task Area Leader Robert Haase from Leipzig University will present a keynote on „Large Language Models for Bio-Image Data Science“. Additionaly, Riccardo Massei from UFZ Leipzig presents about RDM with zebrafish images in a workshop on „Advances and challenges in zebrafish image and video analysis.“
Results from the 2024 OME-NGFF Hackathon
From November 18th to 22nd, the OME-NGFF Hackathon, organized by the BioVisionCenter at the University of Zürich with contribution and co-organization from NFDI4BIOMAGE has significantly boosted the power of OME-Zarr, the implementation of a cloud-ready file format for bioimaging data. Read this Hackathon report to learn about these advancements.
Have you ever wondered if you could access a 100+GB dataset on your mobile device?
OME-Zarr is the bioimaging-specific implementation of the OME-NGFF specification. In other words: A potent, cloud-compatible file format for large N-dimensional array-typed data such as bioimaging data. Watch this video to see the power of OME-Zarr, making it possible to explore a dataset of more than 100 GB in size simply through a web browser. It even works from your mobile phone!o.
Data Management at the TiM 2025 in Münsingen
NFDI4BIOIMAGE, in collaboration with the I3D:bio project, will offer an integrated data management concept and workshops at the Trends in Microscopy Conference in Münsingen (March 17th – 21st).
Workshop for non-imaging stakeholders at the E-Science Tage in Heidelberg
NFDI4BIOIMAGE, in collaboration with I3D:bio, offers a workshop at the E-Science Tage dedicated to research data management in microscopy and image analysis. The workshop is directed at non-bioimaging experts at unviersities and research institutions.
Happy New Year - New Calendar edition available
NFDI4BIOIMAGE’s wall calendar 2025 is now available. The second edition of this calendar presents images, their metadata, and their story on how to progress towards FAIR data. This year, contributions from other NFDI consortia are included, too!
2024
NFDI4BIOIMAGE’s contributions to the Base4NFDI User Conference
The first UC4B event, a two-day conference, was held at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, 20./21. November. NFDI4BIOIMAGE participated with several contributions.
New bioimaging data management training material available in Galaxy
A new hands-on tutorial for using Galaxy and OMERO is now available in the Galaxy Training instance!
Contributions to the DINI Workshop on data management in SFB-INF projects
Collaborative Research Centers (SFBs) rely on INF projects for harmonized RDM. At the recent DINI workshop, K. Krooß shared insights from NFDI4BIOIMAGE. On top, S.Kunis showcased I3D:bio’s work highlighting OMERO’s role in SFB 1557. A great platform for exchanging RDM best practices!
Advancing Biomedical Research Data Management Across NFDI Consortia
Five NFDI consortia conducted a workshop on biomedical data management on Nov. 26 & 27 in Heidelberg. Collaboration and data exchange across consortia are essential on the way to FAIRifying biomedical data. Through presentations and in-depth discussions in a BarCamp, the consortia are intensifying their collaborations on cross-consortia use cases for biomedicine.
New workflows for High Content Screening in Galaxy presented at HMC conference
The complexity and sheer volume of image data, especially from high-content screening (HCS) experiments involving cell lines or other organisms, pose significant challenges towards managing and analysing this data efficiently. Well-defined image processing tools and analysis pipelines are required that align with the FAIR principles, ensuring they are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable across different domains. Riccardo Massei from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and member of NFDI4BIOIMAGE presented his workflows in Galaxy at the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Conference.
NFDI4BIOIMAGE co-organizing the IO-FAST Think Tank Meeting
IO-FAST (initiative for FAIR spatial data) aims to democratize spatial omics data to enable the community to share and (re)use spatial data in a FAIR manner. We will assemble leaders in the field and users to collect ideas, use-cases, pressing problems, solutions and most importantly provide a synergistic environment. With this community-driven effort we hope to introduce easy to apply frameworks and guidelines.
Focus on Imaging at the GBM Compact Symposium in Frankfurt
On September 26-27, the Compact Symposium of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) took place in Frankfurt. The event offered an exciting program that included short talks by early-career scientists, poster presentations, and keynote lectures by leading scientists who are developing and applying groundbreaking imaging techniques for biological research. NFDI4BIOIMAGE participated with two workshops and a booth.
NFDI4BIOIMAGE subproject on VDI showcased at the 10th bwHPC Symposium
On September 26-27, the Compact Symposium of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) took place in Frankfurt. The event offered an exciting program that included short talks by early-career scientists, poster presentations, and keynote lectures by leading scientists who are developing and applying groundbreaking imaging techniques for biological research. NFDI4BIOIMAGE participated with two workshops and a booth.
Use Case Report about Setting up an institutional OMERO system published
As the main use case of our partner project Information Infrastructure for BioImage Data (I3D:bio), the Core Facility Cellular Imaging at the TU Dresden Medical Faculty has implemented a new OMERO instance over the course of the past two years. The RSE team and the Data Stewardship team from NFDI4BIOIMAGE contributed to this use case through supporting the inegration of existing Fiji Macros, and helping with REMBI-compliant metadata annotation. Find the full use case report now published at the Journal of Microscopy.
Join NFDI4BIOIMAGE @ de.NBI Hackathon!
Picking up on last year’s success, NFDI4BIOIMAGE again contributes a Hackathon Project to the 3rd de.NBI Biohackathon Germany, taking place in Kassel from December 9th to 13th. This years project focuses on Increasing interoperability for bioimage dataset resources. Find more information and register here: www.denbi.de
NFDI4BIOIMAGE's 2021 grant proposal is now available on Zenodo
Looking for some summer holiday’s literature? NFDI4BIOIMAGE has now published its 2021 grant application on Zenodo. Read more about our vision, strategy, task areas, and measure.
Join GerBI and Euro-BioImaging for the FoundingGIDE Hackathon in Japan
Join members from German BioImaging (GerBI-GMB), co-applicant in NFDI4BIOIMAGE, for a hackathon to facilitate the global harmonization of imaging metadata and its integration into next-generation file formats in Kobe, Japan, from November 4th to 8th. This hackathon is part of the foundingGIDE project.
Call for Contributions to the 2025 calendar edition!
Contribute to the 2025 edition of the NFDI4BIOIMAGE Calendar! Submit your images and advance with your images on the degree of FAIRness.
NFDI4BIOIMAGE and I3D:bio at the GBM Compact Symposium 2024
The NFDI4BIOIMAGE consortium and the I3D:bio project will jointly offer a 1-hour workshop on research data management for bioimaging at this year’s GBM Compact Symposium on Sept. 26th and 27th in Frankfurt.
VDI developments in NFDI4BIOIMAGE and DataPLANT presented in Darmstadt
On Monday and Tuesday, June 24/25, the Cloud Management working group held its Summer Presence Conference 2024 at TU Darmstadt campus. Central topics were cloud use and how to deal with it at the various institutions, the use of Azure for temporary resources in block courses, presentation of the results of the M365 survey, orientation of M365 in the working group and cooperation with state initiatives and special developments such as the Open Source Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as part of NFDI4BIOIMAGE and further projects.
Workshop Material on OMERO now available as Open Educational Resource
Members of the NFDI4BIOIMAGE consortium recently offered two workshops on using the bioimaging research data management platform OMERO for organizing and structuring microscopy data. The material and presentations slides from both workshops (One two-day online workshop on April 29th &30th, and one on-premise workshop on May 13th) are now available on Zenodo as reusable Open Educational Material.
Workshop Announcement: FAIR microscopy data handling with structured metadata in OMERO
The I3D:bio project and NFDI4BIOIMAGE jointly organize an online workhop on the benefits of using structured metadata annotations in OMERO. Two full days, April 29th and April 30th, 2024
Collaborative Use Case Presentation with DataPLANT and NFDI4Microbiota
As part of NFDI4Microbiota’s use case program, a cross-consortial use case is started in order to understand a lichen (fungus and bacterial photosymbiont; Peltigera spp. and e.g. Nostoc sp. ‚Peltigera membranacea cyanobiont‘) and its microbiome. Public presentation on March 26th.
Results from the Image Analysis in Galaxy Hackathon are now available!
Meet NFDI4BIOIMAGE members at SWAT4HCLS 2024 in Leiden
The Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Health Care and Life Sciences Meeting (SWAT4HCLS) in Netherlands is taking place from February 26th-29th. Our Task Area 1 project leaders, S. Kunis, and J. Moore will participate in the conference. You can take part in Biohackathon on Publishing FAIR Datasets from BioImaging Repositories.
Digital Kitchen Talk by SaxFDM with Robert Haase
On March 14th, at 1 p.m., Robert Haase (TA5 lead in NFDI4BIOIMAGE) will speak about „Cultivating Open Training“ as part of his activities in NFDI4BIOIMAGE and at the Scads.AI at University of Leipzig. The event is free of charge and takes place online!
Job Opportunity: Research Software Engineer
Join the NFDI4BIOIMAGE team as a Research Software Engineer! At the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Dresden / Leipzig (ScaDS.AI) at Leipzig University, our TA5 co-lead Robert Haase is looking for a motivated and skilled colleague.
Take part in the Galaxy Image Analysis Hackathon!
Jointly organized by NFDI4BIOIMAGE and Euro-BioImaging, we invite you to bring reproducible image analysis worksflows to the cloud. Have you established worksflows that make bioimage data analysis FAIR? Help others reuse your workflows by making them available for the bioimaging community in Galaxy! The event takes place in Freiburg from February 26th to March 1st 2024. It is a hybrid event, online participation is possible.
2023
Joint NFDI4BIOIMAGE & DataPLANT project offered at the 2nd de.NBI Biohackathon Germany in Bielefeld.
Organized by LIN Magdeburg and the University of Cologne, the two consortia offer a hackathon project to establish interoperability between the Annotated Research Context (ARC) and the image data management platform OMERO. Strongly supported by the CEPLAS EXC, CECAD EXC, CRC-TRR341, and the RRZK@UniCologne. Check out the program and register here!
NFDI4BIOIMAGE hosted its first Hackathon in multimodal image data integration.
The first successful NFDI4BIOIMAGE – TA3-Hackathon – UoC-2023 took place between November, 29th and December, 1st. All participants from various TAs (Task Areas) of NFDI4Bioimage and our DataPLANT guest actively contributed via presentation, hacking, discussion and documentation on four topics corresponding to various measures in TA3 (Task Area 3) of NFDI4BIOIMAGE. This event was jointly organised by members of CECAD Imaging Facility, CEPLAS, C3RDM, RRZK & TRR341 + support from CECAD-IT, the RRZK Cologne, and LIN Magdeburg: Eik Dahms, Niraj Kandpal, Astrid Schauss, Andrea Schrader, Monica-Valencia Schneider, Peter Zentis, Moritz Hoevels, Daniel Wickeroth, and Torsten Stöter. The workshop results are available to the community on GitHub. This work will serve as the basis to continue advancing this effort during the de.NBI Biohackathon in December 2023.
Job Opportunity for a Scientific Project Manager at our international partner Euro-BioImaging ERIC in Heidelberg
Within the new EU-funded project FoundingGIDE, there is an excellent job opportunity open at Euro-BioImaging Bio-Hub at the EMBL in Heidelberg. The team is looking for a Scientific Project Manager. Check out the information and apply by Dec. 8th, 2023
BioImage Analysis Training School and Symposium co-organized by our co-applicant institution TU Dresden
Co-organized by Robert Haase, task area leader in NFDI4BIOIMAGE, the Physics of Life BioImage Analysis Symposium and Training School will take place from August 28th to September 1st in Dresden. Find more information here.
First in-person Steering Board Meeting of NFDI4BIOIMAGE
How exciting to finally meet with all the enthusiastic Task Area Leaders and the NFDI4BIOIMAGE project office in-person. During a two day workshop, the Steering Board, consisting of the Task Area Leaders from the Co-Applicant institutions elaborated the path to forward the implementation of the consortium. We will keep you posted on the process.
Workshop Announcement: 2nd Workshop on FAIR Data in Plasma Science – May 3rd & 4th
This workshop is organized with contribution from our participating institution Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology. Find more information here.
Official start of the funding phase
Today, the NFDI4BIOIMAGE consortium officially starts. We are excited to start working on our planned goals. We will keep you posted with updates soon.
2022
NFDI4BIOIMAGE is approved by the Joint Science Conference as one of eight new NFDI consortia starting in 2023
It’s official: The Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz (GWK) has now approved all eight consortia of the third call that had been previously recommended for funding by the German Research Foundation. The new consortia will start going into operation as of March 2023. We are very excited and grateful to all supporters, co-applicants, participants, and friends.
Funding recommendations by the NFDI expert committee announced
The NFDI4BIOIMAGE initiative was informed to be among the seven consortia that will be recommended for funding to the joint science conference. We are excited and grateful for all the support from the bioimaging community. We are looking forward to the hopefully positive final decision by the joint science conference, which is expected in November 2022.
Results of the NFDI4BIOIMAGE community survey published
Please find the results including all original data on our 2021 NFDI4BIOIMAGE community survey published on F1000Research:
Schmidt C, Hanne J, Moore J et al. Research data management for bioimaging: the 2021 NFDI4BIOIMAGE community survey. F1000Research 2022, 11:638 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.121714.2) (October: Update on peer-review status: [version 2; peer review: 2 approved])
Presentation on microscopy image data management by members of NFDI4BIOIMAGE
On February 6th, at 4 pm, our spokesperson Stefanie Weidtkamp-Peters (HHU Düsseldorf), and two consortium members, J. Hanne (GerBI-GMB e.V.) & C. Schmidt (German Cancer Research Center) will talk about „A journey to FAIR microscopy data“, presenting about challenges and opportunities in bioimaging RDM, and about the projects I3D:bio and NFDI4BIOIMAGE. Host: MoMAN Ulm. Find more information and the access link to the online seminar here.
2021
NFDI4BIOIMAGE proposal submitted
On Nov. 2nd, the NFDI4BIOIMAGE initiative has submitted its proposal to become a funded consortium within the NFDI framework. We would like to express our gratitude to all co-applicant institutions, participating individuals and institutes, partners, supporters, collaborating NFDI-consortia, the DFG and many more. We are looking forward to the review phase now.