From 8 to 10 June 2026, Lyon hosted the 12th annual ELIXIR All Hands Meeting — the flagship event that brings together representatives from ELIXIR Nodes across Europe, along with partners and collaborating organisations, to review achievements, share ongoing work, and shape future directions. This year’s programme combined plenary talks, mini-symposia, and hands-on workshops in an inspiring setting — and the Czech delegation made its presence felt throughout.
Federated Compute: Why It Matters — and the CESNET Example
The ELIXIR Compute Platform session brought renewed focus to federated compute services in the context of the emerging EOSC Federation, EuroHPC, and the new AI Factories. The session explored how ELIXIR On Cloud services can be deployed in national and thematic settings, and how they can serve new use cases from ELIXIR’s Communities.
Ludek Matyska delivered the talk “Why federated compute services matter and the CESNET example”, demonstrating in concrete terms how Czechia is contributing to this federated vision — and why distributed infrastructure, rather than centralised solutions, is the right answer for the diversity of life sciences research.
Tools Platform: Software Management, AI Readiness, and Research Software Ecosystems
The ELIXIR Tools Platform mini-symposium offered a guided tour of key advancements in software services and community practices — from research software management and workflows to sustainability, benchmarking, and the broader Research Software Ecosystem. The session moved from platform overview to real-world impact, showing how these tools support scientists in practice.
Two Czech researchers were among the featured speakers. Marek Suchanek presented “Management plans for software and workflows”, addressing how developers and teams can plan and track key aspects of software development while following best-practice guidance. Helge Hecht contributed “How EDAM and RSEc can improve AI readiness”, exploring how the EDAM ontology and the Research Software Ecosystem can help position life sciences tools and data for the age of artificial intelligence.
ELIXIR-STEERS: Software Management Plans in Practice
The ELIXIR-STEERS workshop on research software management built directly on community input gathered at last year’s AHM and a dedicated workshop held in December 2025. The session introduced a newly developed Software Management Planning framework — designed to help developers and teams plan and track software quality while following established best practices.
Karel Berka opened with an overview of the best practice indicators and quality metrics that underpin the framework. Marek Suchanek then presented the Software Management Plan implementation within the Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW), followed by a hands-on working session led by Suchanek and Jan Slifka, in which participants could begin drafting their own Software Management Plans and provide direct feedback on usability. The goal: refine the SMPs in DSW for broader rollout across ELIXIR.
Health Data: Sharing Challenges Across Nodes
The meeting also featured a dedicated workshop on health data — one of ELIXIR’s most strategically important areas, connected to the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and the ELIXIR Human Data and Translational Research theme. The session combined lightning talks from individual Nodes on their health data activities and challenges, followed by collaborative problem-solving in small groups using Miro. Vojtěch Bystrý represented ELIXIR CZ with a lightning talk on the node’s health data activities and the key challenges it faces — contributing to a broader cross-node dialogue on how to navigate the technical, ethical, and governance complexities of working with sensitive data under GDPR.
More Than Just Talks
The hallway conversations — over coffee, at lunch, and after hours — were every bit as valuable as the formal programme. These moments are where new collaborations take shape, where experiences are exchanged across Nodes, and where concrete agreements are made that would take months to reach by email. The atmosphere at AHM reflects what ELIXIR as a community truly is: open, connected, and ambitious — a space where science and infrastructure meet.
Thank You
A big thank you to all members of the Czech delegation for their active participation and excellent representation of ELIXIR CZ. We look forward to building on everything that was started in Lyon!
The Czech delegation at AHM 2026 represented a broad cross-section of the national research community, with participants from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Masaryk University, Czech Technical University in Prague, University of West Bohemia, Palacký University Olomouc, Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University, and the Institute of Biotechnology.
ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2026, Lyon, France, 8–10 June 2026
