Jill Hronek, Director of Marketing and Communications at SLAS, comments on the SLAS2025 theme of curiosity, celebrating how it drives discovery and innovation.

What we often hear (and LOVE to hear) at the SLAS International Conference & Exhibition is “I get to explore topics I don’t know anything about!” and “I get to hear a completely new perspective on something I thought I knew everything about!” SLAS fosters, feeds and fuels scientific curiosity.

That’s why we leaned into this word, this idea for SLAS2025: CURIOUS. Every scientific endeavour starts with curiosity and the answer to every scientific question brings about a new question. “What would happen if…?” “I wonder what causes this…” or “Let’s try this and see what happens.”

SLAS2025 brings scientific discovery and technology together under one roof and in doing so, answers questions while allowing the exploration of what’s beyond those answers.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio was so curious about curiosity that he wrote a book about it. He said: “You can enhance curiosity by doing certain things, by asking questions, by encouraging people to be curious about things”. We design our conferences to be that catalyst: We provide scientific sessions for you to learn something new, networking time to ask questions of those around you, and technology providers who share the excitement and passion of what’s possible.

Curiosity brings new solutions

SLAS spends quality time thinking about new ideas and what is next. We not only want to keep our conferences fresh and engaging but we want to push farther, lead the field, and improve what we’re doing as an organisation and as a world-class event.

This year’s NexusXp pavilion is one of those solutions. We think of it as Lab of the Future 2.0. Our original Lab of the Future aimed to bring attention to those technology providers who worked to increase automation of workflows, ensure connectivity within and between labs, and improve work for (not replace) the human operators in the lab.

NexusXp shows the critical link or connection between automation technology integrations and how it transforms research. With solutions-focused automation success stories and simulations, collaborative integration scenarios demonstrating how a lab can integrate various technology providers’ automation solutions to work in unison, and multi-company discussion areas to better understand the platform relationships and provide participants with actionable insights, NexusXp will help lab directors, principal investigators, or other lab heads at any stage of the automation trajectory build a plan to accelerate their research.

Curiosity can help you grow and lead

SLAS and SLAS2025 provides countless opportunities for networking and personal growth. We’ve introduced a Meet-Up Hub in the SLAS Booth for groups of like- minded people to connect and share ideas. We also have 16 Topical Interest Groups (TIGs) conducting in-person meetings – so join a discussion and build your network. Need a little one-on-one with an expert to guide your career? We have mentoring available for those looking to advance or change their career path, recruiter hours for companies looking to hire the best talent that they can find, and job seekers to find that next opportunity.

Being curious as a leader helps you create a strong, motivated, empathetic team that cares about collective success rather than personal gain. We invite you to bring your team to participate in our Soap Saves Lives Experience to build hygiene kits for San Diego veterans, maternity programmes and seniors in need. It’s our way of giving back to the city that hosts us!

Curiosity is forward thinking

Curiosity is never-ending and we’re here for the long haul. Sustainability is key to our collective success and SLAS, its partners, members, and technology providers strive to preserve the planet, the people on it and the relationships that fuel our scientific progress.

As such, we’ve partnered with Honeycomb Strategies and Aclymate to help you offset your carbon footprint. We limit and build our signage out of recyclable and reusable materials and use digital signage wherever possible. We’ve worked with our exhibitors to provide best practices for a greener exhibition, and we will donate unused food, promotional items or event supplies to local organisations to keep them out of the waste stream. While our theme colour may be orange, we are always thinking green.

Thank you for joining us in San Diego and we hope to see you or your colleagues in Hamburg, 20- 22 May for SLAS Europe 2025 Conference & Exhibition.

From DDW Volume 26 – Issue 1, Winter 2024/25 Read the digital issue

About the author:

Jill Hronek has served as the Director, Marketing and Communications for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening since 2018. She and her team are responsible for getting people in seats, eyes on screens, and words and images on pages to engage and inform the SLAS life sciences community and transform research.