A BioImagingUK Network: A Scientific Community Defining Strategic Initiatives for UK BioImaging.

By its very nature, cutting edge imaging depends on advanced hardware and expert personnel. In most cases, UK life scientists and medical researchers have access to the imaging infrastructures necessary to support their immediate work and significant investments by UK Research Councils and charities have built a number of world-class imaging facilities in academic departments and institutes across the UK. The imaging facilities at any individual institution, however, are usually driven by the local research priorities and not all imaging modalities at any single institution are at the state of the art. Furthermore, over the last decade enormous leaps have been made in imaging technology with advances in resolution, speed, sensitivity, signal processing, functional readouts and biophysical modelling - now reaching previously unimagined capabilities. The increasing sophistication and concomitant expense and complexity of this new technology, however, make it impractical to build and run cutting edge imaging technology at every site in the UK. While several individual sites have established specific expertise in one or more of these emerging imaging technologies, no single institution can provide all the imaging capabilities that can now be applied to biological questions and which will become increasingly necessary in modern bioscience. Nonetheless, if UK life scientists and medical researchers are going to stay at the international forefront of their fields, they need access to all of these technologies. Thus there is a critical need to define the imaging instrumentation and personnel infrastructure, access policies, and sustainable support mechanisms that must underpin UK science going forward.

We have built BioImagingUK (http://bioimaginguk.org), a grassroots initiative to define strategic priorities, access policies, and sustainable practices for UK imaging science. That effort has built an aligned, committed consortium of imaging scientists and technologists who have contributed to a clear, public statement of strategy and policy for UK bioimaging.
To date, BioImagingUK's activities include a series of community activities centred on organising our priorities, developing strategic statements, representing the interests of the UK bioimaging scientists, and coordinating UK's response to Euro-BioImaging's evolving activities and calls for proposals.

This proposal seeks the first formal funding for BioImagingUK, to form a UK Network, that will be used to continue and expand BioImagingUK's activities.

We have built BioImagingUK (http://bioimaginguk.org), a grassroots initiative to define strategic priorities, access policies, and sustainable practices for UK imaging science. That effort has built an aligned, committed consortium of imaging scientists and technologists who have contributed to a clear, public statement of strategy and policy for UK bioimaging.
To date, BioImagingUK's activities include a series of community activities centred on organising our priorities, developing strategic statements, representing the interests of the UK bioimaging scientists, and coordinating UK's response to Euro-BioImaging's evolving activities and calls for proposals. Since our founding in 2009, we have:

1. Held several open meetings of the UK bioimaging community to define actions, strategy and planning (http://bioimaginguk.org/index.php/Meetings_Page);
2. Convened a meeting of >70 UK bioimaging scientists in July 2012, and released a public summary of the priorities the meeting defined, the BioImagingUK Strategy Meeting Summary (http://bioimaginguk.org/images/0/04/BioImagingUK_Meeting_Summary_v5.pdf);
3. Presented the case for community-led strategic prioritization at several UK imaging meetings (e.g., http://www.rms.org.uk/events/pastevents/index/frontiersinbioimaging; http://www.rms.org.uk/Resources/Royal Microscopical Society/Events/fmm-2014-provisional-programme-7.pdf);
4. Represented the UK at Euro-BioImaging Stakeholder & Steering Committee Meetings (http://www.eurobioimaging.eu/content-page/united-kingdom; http://www.eurobioimaging.eu/content-page/euro-bioimaging-steering-committee) and coordinated submission of the UK's Expressions of Interest for Euro-BioImaging Nodes (http://www.eurobioimaging.eu/content-page/first-euro-bioimaging-open-call-nodes-parta-archive-information)

This proposal seeks the first formal funding for BioImagingUK, to form a UK Network, that will be used to continue and expand BioImagingUK's activities.

The impacts generated by the BioImagingUK Network will all involve benefits to the wider scientific community-from funders, technologists, all scientists from PhD students to academic staff, and ultimately the broader community. :
1. We will continue to develop interaction and communication within the existing BioImagingUK community energising collaboration and community communication and participation.

2. We will develop a number of resources of online public resources defining priorities and opportunities for investment for the larger UK scientific community. The reports generated by BioImagingUK will provide a strategic coherent statement for funders and applicants to align their future calls and applications to defined priorities for the UK scientific community.

3. BioImagingUK's commitment to public online publication will serve as a clear statement of how scientific communities in the UK and elsewhere can organise and communicate their priorities.

4. The BioImagingUK Network will improve the quality of training capability and activity in the UK and hopefully in the Rest of World. The resources we will develop will establish the BioImagingUK Network as a an authoritative resource for information on imaging to a wider and scientific public communities.

5. Our reports on career and investment in imaging technologists and the output of their work will serve as a concrete statement of the critical contributions of these individuals in the UK sciences and drive the discussion for providing for these critical personnel with universities and funding agencies.

6. Our on-going efforts to extend our communities to include other scientific domains in medicine, pathology and material sciences will enable the interactions between different research councils and different funding bodies and provide community based rational for these interactions.

7. Our willingness to define points of synergy and interaction while respecting the differences between communities can serve as a template for the ways different scientific communities can talk to another and indeed develop synergetic interactions.