The network has researchers from Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

“It is absolutely crucial that we work together in the Nordic Region, because this is a rapidly developing scientific field, and when we join forces across the Nordic countries, we can compare ourselves with larger countries such as France, Germany and Italy. The Nordic countries are very similar and we have a lot in common. We need these ties between us, and it is very important that we meet each other across countries. In our network of imaging facilities, we meet at our yearly imaging symposium and exchange valuable knowledge, making it much more interesting to work with microscopy and improve the help we can give the research scientists that use our microscopes,” says Oddmund Bakke from the University of Oslo. He is heading the research network “Bridging Nordic Microscopy Infrastructures-II (BNMI-II)”, which is part of NordForsk’s research infrastructure initiative.

“If someone had told me at the end of the 1980s, when I was a young researcher with relatively primitive microscopes, that within a few decades we would be able to study living biological processes at the molecular level with such precision, it would have sounded like science fiction,” says Oddmund Bakke to NordForsk. “Advanced microscopes have become one of the most important discovery tools in biomedical and natural sciences.”

the University of Oslo houses some of the most advanced microscopes and imaging instruments in the Nordic region.