The 2025 CBIOMES Annual Meeting brought together nearly sixty collaborators at the Simons Foundation in New York City, June 16 – 18, for three days of face-to-face connection, scientific exchange, and collaborative momentum.
Reporting by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
The meeting opened with a welcome and introductions led by Mick Follows of MIT, to orient old and new with a plenary overview of the collaboration titled “CBIOMES: Cells, Biogeography, and Global Cycles.” This was followed by a presentation from Jed Fuhrman of USC, “Basin-scale microbial plankton biogeographies: applications and improvements.”
The first thematic session, “From Cellular Allocation to Global Biogeochemical Cycles,” was organized by Zoe Finkel and Erin Bertrand of Dalhousie University, Canada, and featured seven early-career speakers. Nuwanthi Samarasinghe, and Nolan Fehon (Dalhousie) began with summaries of their recent findings on stoichiometry and macromolecular allocation in small diatoms and Synechococcus. Julia Cantelo, Patrick White (Dalhousie), and Erin Bertrand presented new proteomic analyses of cultures and field samples, illustrating how protein allocation varies across taxa and environmental conditions. Zoe Aarons (MIT) and Niall McGinty (Dalhousie) contributed analyses of C:N:P stoichiometry in phytoplankton and zooplankton. The session concluded with a presentation by Shlomit Sharoni (MIT), who introduced a macromolecular model demonstrating how environmental forcing and future climate scenarios may alter plankton composition and food quality.
The second day began with a session on biogeography from metabarcode data and, in particular, the Global rRNA Universal Metabarcoding Plankton database, GRUMP, Convened by Jesse McNichol of St. Xavier University, Canada, he and Nathan Williams (USC) framed the session by expanding on the new tool’s promise and potential. Yubin Raut (MIT) then presented work on marine plankton realms using GRUMP and global ecosystem models, followed by Lexi Jones-Kellett (MIT), who shared insights into mesoscale community organization based on GRUMP data from the Gradients 4 transect. The session concluded with a hands-on workshop led by Williams, guiding participants through interaction with GRUMP data.
Later that day, a session on computational methods in marine data analysis featured plenary presentations offering a historical overview of computational efforts within CBIOMES, as well as recent advances in deep learning and statistical modeling. Beginning with an overview from session convenor Christian Müller (U. Helmholtz, Germany), Kevin Egan (U. Hawaii) discussed physics-informed neural networks for ocean data assimilation, and Jacob Bien (USC) presented on mixture-of-experts models for oceanographic applications. The session wrapped up with a hands-on R coding tutorial led by Viet Tran (U. Helmholtz), introducing the CC-BIOMES framework for downstream statistical analysis.
The final day featured a series of contributed and lightning talks from Andrew Irwin (Dalhousie), Bror Jönsson (UNH), Christian Müller, Žarko Kovač (U Split, Croatia), Bob Brewin (U Exeter, UK), and Patrick White (Dalhousie) followed by mini-workshops.
Chris Edwards of UCSC led a follow-up session on the Workshop on Modeling Primary Production held earlier in the year at the Simons Foundation. The session reviewed outcomes for those who had not attended, encouraged discussion of new topics, and supported continued collaboration among small groups formed during the original workshop.
In parallel, Ioannis Tsakalakis of HCMR led a focused discussion on a review paper being written about Diel cycles, moderated on-site by Joe Vallino. Tsakalakis reported that the group refined the structure of the Introduction and agreed to center it around previous reviews on diel cycles in phytoplankton, including foundational work from Berman et al. (1992) and more recent contributions by Morimoto (2020) and Boyd and Van Mooy (2025).
The meeting concluded with wrap-up remarks from Mick Follows and informal collaboration time among attendees.
As in past years, the meeting included daily poster sessions and unstructured collaboration time. Overall, the meeting fostered a productive exchange of ideas, strengthened collaborations, and advanced research themes within the CBIOMES framework. “We’ve made a lot of progress integrating data, models, and theory. This meeting gave us a chance to celebrate those achievements and sharpen our focus on the next phase—delivering ecosystem simulations tested by, and grounded in, global-scale molecular surveys,” said Mick Follows. “Seeing the energy and engagement across the collaboration was incredibly motivating. Meetings like this remind us why collaboration matters—and how much more we can achieve together.”
2025 Annual Meeting presentations, videos, & materials (restricted)
Special thanks to session organizers, and plenary presenters, as well as everyone who shared a poster. Next year’s meeting will be held on June 15 – 17, 2026, at the Simons Foundation in NYC.
Story Image credit: The Simons Foundation