“Fragmentation is always an issue - harmonization is the key.”

1. BUILD RELATIONSHIPS, SHAPE FUTURE
Within National Node and EIRENE RI 

Throughout the past year, our focus in this area has been twofold: fostering connections within the exposome community and its organizations while strategically defining our future path (institutionally).

As a consortium of four partner institutions - University of Vienna, Medical University of Vienna, Medical University of Innsbruck and Environment Agency Austria - and a member country of the ESFRI-EIRENE research infrastructure of the ESFRI Roadmap, these efforts remain at the forefront of our collaborative agenda.

• March | First retreat of Exposome Austria was held in Retz, the winery center of Lower Austria´s Weinviertel brought together members of our concortium, their research group, and also several invited experts from the exposome-related community. Relationships with Exposome Austria were deepened and new ideas to broaden collaboration came up, e.g. planning of the national pilot studies. 
  
  
• May | 2nd Advisory Board Meeting convened again at the University of Vienna, uniting members of the international advisory body and EA consortium. The board recognized an excellent performance of the Exposome Austria research infrastructure in its initial year and suggested several valuable recommendations we have started to implement.

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• October & December | EIRENE Preparatory Phase Project Meetings Exposome Austria closely connected and aligned with the European EIRENE partners through multiple meetings both in person and remotely; preparatory phase project was discussed both in Q4 at the Vienna meeting hosted by UNIVIE team and the EIRENE consortium meeting in Rome where many of the national nodes´ representatives met. 
  
  
• 2023 | Four national consortium meetings were organized (2 in person, 2 remotely) to keep the momentum of the National Node´s building process going and regularly discuss the progress and goals the consortium strives to achieve.

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2. IDENTIFYING CAPACITIES & COMMUNITY NEEDS

Complete inventory, diversify resource channels

There is a lot what a distributed, laboraty-intensive research infrastructure needs: cutting-edge instruments, materials, highly qualified scientific and management personnel. Our immediate focus therefore lies on strengthening the node's finances through diverse funding streams. A comprehensive inventory to identify gaps and develop corresponding services was therefore started to be established.

• 2023 | Exposome Austria participated in diverse third-party funding calls
  
  
• 2023 | New mass spectrometric top-notch
  instrumentations were acquired with the support from the University of Vienna and Medical University Innsbruck for enhanced technological capacities. 
  
  
• 2023 | Exposome Austria advanced exposomic workflow inventory to identify the needs of the European infrastructure and community, listing the services that are ready to deploy, ready to be offered to the users-customers from academia, research and industry.

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3. DISSEMINATION & INTERNATIONALIZATION
Watch & learn, exchange experience, go public

 
Establishing Austria's exposomics research infrastructure node is a challenging, long-term endeavor. Team members visited EU partners and coordinator institution in Brno, Czech Republic. 

• February | Members of EA  personnel  spent three insightful days at RECETOX Research Infrastructure in Brno, Czech. Rep. Both physical and virtual access is provided. 
  
  
• June | Exposome Austria´s national coordinator Prof. Benedikt Warth explained the importance of exposome research in an interview for Rudolphina, the  University of Vienna´s magazine. 
  
  
• November | Exposome-related questions as well as the role of Exposome Austria in this field were also thoroughly addressed in the healthcare journal Hausärzt:in (pages 78, 80).

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• June | Exposome Austria researchers even increased their standard travel pace, fostering connections and sharing methods and results. First, at the 71st conference of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) in Houston, Texas.  
  
  
• June | A collaborative retreat with Karolina Institutet in Solna, Sweden proved to be highly inspiring with noteworthy research presentations and activities. 
  
  
• July-August | Visiting scientist Julia Kuligowski from the Health Research Institute Hospital La Fe in Valencia, Spain, used our RI-instrumentation for early-life exposure assessment throughout the summer 2023. 

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