On Thursday 16 October 2025 CoSeC staff came together at STFC Daresbury Laboratory to celebrate a year of success and achievements for CoSeC.

The day began with an introduction from CoSeC Director, Stephen Longshaw, who spoke about some of the exciting activities that had taken place over the last twelve months. The audience were then treated to two guest presentations. CoSeC Fellow, Ignatius Ezeani from Lancaster University, spoke about his experiences as one of the first cohort of CoSeC Fellows, highlighting some of the work and collaborations he had been able to complete as a result of his Fellowship funding. Ignatius was followed by Shaoib Sufi from the University Manchester who presented on the “Research Software Quality Kit“.

Following an extended lunch and poster session that highlighted some of the recent work completed by CoSeC staff we moved onto a discussion session where the CoSeC Programme Office were able to gather the thoughts and ideas of staff on three topics… ideas for what a successful and inclusive event looks like, potential barriers to cross-community activity within CoSeC, and thoughts on what CoSeC staff would like CoSeC to look like in 5 years time. The feedback from this session will be used by the Programme Office in future planning discussions.

With the “official” part of the day complete the meeting closed with the inaugural CoSeC staff awards ceremony. This was an opportunity to recognise the work of our staff as we presented the CoSeC Staff Impact Award 2025 and the CoSeC Early Career Researcher Award 2025.

Dr Alin Elena, a computational scientist leading the Data-Driven Molecular and Materials Science Group in the Scientific Computing Department, was awarded the 2025 CoSeC Staff Impact Award. Alin is a member of the CCP5 and CCP-QC communities in CoSeC and received the award for enabling, through technical expertise, the delivery of extended hands-on sessions for several CoSeC training events in 2025, including the long-running and very well respected annual CCP5 Summer School.

Dr Joel Greer was the inaugural recipient of the CoSeC Early Career Researcher Award for his work investigating methods to observe molecular motions from cryo electron microscopy. Joel is a member of the CCP-EM community based at Research Complex at Harwell and is also part of the newly formed DRIIMB consortium. Joel’s current work will ensure that STFC Scientific Computing and CCP-EM remain at the bleeding edge of cryoEM software development.

The day was a very enjoyable celebration of all things CoSeC and we are already looking forward to the 2026 meeting that will be held at STFC  Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.