End-of-2023 message and Season's greetings

 Dear all, 

As we are approaching the end of 2023, we would like to take the opportunity to briefly reflect on this year and the future. 


This year, we had several crucial successes. We would like to specifically mention/highlight:

  • The paper presenting BioDynaMo’s exceptional performance was published in the Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. The work provides an impressive evaluation when considering also other well-established software: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3572848.3577480
  • The first neuroscientific paper using BioDynaMo was published in the prestigious journal Royal Society Open Biology, by previous BioDynaMo member Dr Jean de Montigny as first author: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsob.220217
  • We organised three international, hybrid meetings that included speakers talking about BioDynaMo and its applications (see for instance https://www.combynelab.com/home/news/cambi2023). We particularly highlight the BioDynaMo workshop hosted at the Italian Society of Telemedicine conference, which was very well attended. We intend to continue such meetings on a regular basis in future.
  • We provided a 3-hour tutorial on BioDynaMo at the NETSKINMODELS EU COST Action conference at the University of Surrey, Guildford, in July.
  • We recently got a paper accepted at a very prestigious journal (more news soon), with our very own Nicolo as first author.
  • Nicolo successfully passed his viva. Congratulations Dr Cogno, very well-deserved!
  • Many additional functionalities and example code were included on the BioDynaMo website. These are crucial to get new users and collaborators on board.
  • BioDynaMo has been awarded funding to cover the salary of a research associate based at CERN, to continue working on the software for 2 years.


These success stories (and apologies for not being able to bring up all!) are testimony to the truly impressive work that our members have accomplished this year. We are sure you will agree their hard work, dedication and ambition needs to be congratulated on!


Obviously, we also need to look forward and face upcoming events and challenges. We’d like to refer to the ECCOMAS mini-symposium that we are organizing with other relevant scientists: we are currently looking for more abstract submissions, which are due by the 15th of January. If you are interested or have colleagues/collaborators who may be interested, please disseminate this opportunity: https://blog.biodynamo.org/2023/09/minisymposium-eccomas-2024.html


We’d also like to bring up that as an open-source software collaboration we need to rely on contributions from generous and committed members who generously support and help maintain the code, as well as help new joiners with issues. We currently have some bugs with regards to the continuous integration, so if you have skills to help, that will be much appreciated! Information on how to contact us and discuss how to contribute can be found here: https://www.biodynamo.org/contacts-us/support-biodynamo . At this point, we’d like to say a big thank you to those members who have done this during the year, and particularly Tobias Duswald who arguably provided the most active support!


Finally, we want to thank you thank and congratulate all to the recent successes of BioDynaMo. We wish you all a wonderful Christmas period and a healthy, happy and successful 2024!


All the best,


Roman and Vasilis


"Season's Greetings" by May Wong (CC BY 2.0 DEED)


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