Infra Access for Life Science Sweden (InfraLife) is a new life science initiative which aims to maximise the benefits of investments made in Sweden’s large-scale strategic research infrastructures.
The joint effort between ESS, MAX IV and SciLifeLab is a unique and influential collaboration within the life sciences. The aim is to seek synergies and expand the knowledge and availability of new technologies to new user groups to be able to tackle global societal challenges.
While ESS’s neighbour, MAX IV, houses the brightest X-ray source in the world, and ESS will be the brightest neutron sources in the world, SciLifeLab is a national infrastructure for molecular bioscience research.
As part of InfraLife, the three facilities will engage the broad life science community within the fields of academia, industry and health care, and jointly develop new technology-, data- and challenge-driven capabilities across all sectors of life science.
The InfraLife hub will build on the individual external relations functions at the three infrastructures, by bridging them and providing a single point of entry. Two industrial branch organisations, SwedenBio and Läkemedelsindustriföreningen (LIF), will act as partners and provide a link to the entire industrial life science community throughout Sweden.
Unique collaborations
By increasing collaborations and extending accessibility, the work of InfraLife will be key to both encouraging novel findings and innovations, and enabling research and technology advances for the benefit of society at large. One of the goals of the project is to engage with existing challenge-driven and cross-sectorial large collaborations in order to best utilise available technologies at the three infrastructures, and thereby tackle major challenges within the field of life science.
A kick-off workshop is planned for the spring of 2021, and one of the first tasks will be to gather stakeholders connected to the field of antibiotic resistance. A number of further workshops and activities with other focus areas will follow. Here, InfraLife welcomes input from stakeholders on other important or key topics.
Two key positions
The project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, is being kick-started with an open call to recruit the two External Relations Officers who will form the unit’s core.
One of the two positions will be based at SciLifeLab (KTH) and the other at MAX IV (Lund University). The closing date for applications is 31 January.