European Galaxy Days 2025: Many communities, one buzzing week in Freiburg

From 1–3 October 2025, the University of Freiburg hosted a packed, three-in-one meeting: European Galaxy Days (EGD), the ELIXIR Galaxy Community face-to-face meeting, and the EuroScienceGateway (ESG) Final Meeting with ~100 participants (87 in person + 12 online). Running side-by-side, these events created a special week where platform maintainers, tool and workflow developers, and domain scientists aligned roadmaps and moved from slides to practical solutions and future collaborations.

Across talks, demos, Birds-of-a-Feathers (BoFs), and a concluding hackathon, the week showed how the Galaxy ecosystem is advancing research across domains from Microbiology, Materials Science, Ecology, Climate Science, Imaging, and Digital Humanities. Freiburg’s campus hosted hybrid sessions and BoFs across multiple rooms, with Friday dedicated to a focused Co-Fest & Hackathon where groups squashed bugs, improved tools, tuned workflows, and formed plans for next collaborations. If you want to learn more about the event, please have a look at our social media coverage on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn (47 posts with #EGD2025). Also, Matrix channels (usegalaxy-eu Lobby and use-galaxy announce) supported live coordination and announcements and both are still available if you are interested to join.

Slides & photos

• Photo gallery: https://photos.app.goo.gl/haiWYYBryV4pKvxe9
• Slides:

Slide Title	Presenter(s)
Welcome, Logistics & General Galaxy and ELIXIR Update	Hans-Rudolf Hotz
Special Interest Groups and Working Groups: the Galaxy Governance Model	Marisa Loach
The Microbiology Galaxy Lab and the effort from the microGalaxy to build the first community-driven gateway for reproducible and FAIR analysis of microbial data	Bérénice Batut
Building More Usable Galaxy Workflows with Improved Dataset Collections	John Chilton
A Galaxy Workflow for MAG Recovery Applied to Termite Microbiomes	Mina Hojat Ansari
Managing materials science workflows with Galaxy at STFC	Leandro Liborio
The ISCC Discovery Protocol: Decentralized signing, timestamping, and discovery for the International Standard Content Code (ISCC)	Titusz Pan
The Galaxy Community in Switzerland	Hans-Rudolf Hotz
Galaxy Small Scale Admins	Hans-Rudolf Hotz
Single Cell and Spatial Omics Community	Marisa Loach
The Biodiversity Galaxy Lab: A Collaborative Hub with curated tools, workflows and training	Solenne Correard
Galaxy Datarmor Present and Future Perspectives	Jérôme Detoc
Streamlining the User Experience for Reproducible Image Analysis in Galaxy	Leonid Kostrykin
From Galaxy to EGA: Orchestrating Sensitive Data Access for Interactive Federated Analysis.	María Chavero Díez
Dynamic Meta-Scheduling in Galaxy with TPV Broker for Smarter Workload Distribution	Paul De Geest
On-demand, Reproducible Galaxy Instances in a Secure Environment for the Dutch Scientific Community	Mirela Minkova
Automatic tool generation for SAQC and OGS – Community building beyond users	Matthias Bernt
Evolution of Galaxy at Bologna Sant’Orsola Hospital	Giuseppe Profiti
Precision Diagnosis and Risk Stratification of Helicobacter pylori-Induced Gastritis Using Multi-Omics Machine Learning Signatures Or The Synergy Between Complex Research Projects and Galaxy	Paul Zierep
Broadening the Galaxy: Introducing Digital Humanities in Galaxy	Daniela Schneider
Serving Locally Hosted LLMs with Galaxy	Arash Kadkhodaei
pyGenomeTracks – make a publishable figure out of your NGS data	Lucille Lopez-Delisle
Galaxy Ecology: A new "2 step approach" to contribute source code for Galaxy (re)users(From raw data to operational indicators through essential variables)	Yvan Le Bras
Galaxy Tools 2.0 — The next step in accessibility?	Marius van den Beek
Simple and Secure Credential Handling for Tools in Galaxy	Alireza Heidari
New integrations: ELNs (eLabFTW, RSpace) and ARC job runner	José Manuel Domínguez
Making Galaxy workflows sustainable and FAIR	Nicola Soranzo
Galaxy Ecology 2025 update	Yvan Le Bras
Galaxy facing EARTH SYSTEM challenges	Jérôme Detoc
Updates from the Imaging Community	Beatriz Serrano-Solano
Modern Genome Browsing in Galaxy with JBrowse2	Anthony Bretaudeau
GALAXY & ONEDATA INTEGRATION — managing Galaxy data using Onedata (BYOD & BYOS)	Lukasz Opiola
Automating Galaxy Tool Management Using Templated Repository	Martin Čech
Sustainability of a Platform: The Case of Galaxy	Jain Smitesh
A “trivial” task: how to access my files and projects on the HPC file system from Galaxy?	Nikolay Vazov
Laniakea Nebula: VPN-Based Isolation for Galaxy Private Deployments	Marco Antonio Tangaro
Exploring the Galaxy Training Network: What’s Here, What’s New	Teresa Müller
RO-Crate features in Galaxy (that you might already be using)	Eli Chadwick
EuroScienceGateway – Final Project Meeting (Work Package 1)	Armin Dadras, Anika Erxleben-Eggenhofer
Achievements of Work Package 2 of EuroScienceGateway – Stimulate FAIR and Reusable Research	Eli Chadwick, Stian Soiland-Reyes
Achievements of Work Package 3 of EuroScienceGateway – The European Pulsar Network and Open Infrastructure	Marco Antonio Tangaro
Achievements of Work Package 4 of EuroScienceGateway – Building Blocks for a Sustainable Operating Model	Sebastian Luna-Valero
Achievements of Work Package 5 of EuroScienceGateway – Community Engagement, Adoption, and Onboarding	Nikolay Vazov, Leandro Liborio, Volodymyr Savchenko

Thanks to the University of Freiburg, ELIXIR, the European Commission for making this event possible, and everyone who contributed talks, demos, code, and reviews. Community momentum is strong—the next community event is already underway. Are you ready for GCC2026 in Clermont-Ferrand (France) from June 22-24 2026?