Like many new French public research groups often confronted with saturated laboratory space, we have navigated temporary space constraints while awaiting our permanent offices and laboratory facilities. 🏢🔍 Despite these logistical challenges, our team has maintained remarkable productivity and enthusiasm. We extend our sincere gratitude to Professor Mohamed Mehiri for his support and for hosting us during this transitional period.

This facility will be transformed into a fully equipped collaborative environment designed to enhance research synergies and innovation among our team members. 🔬✨ I extend my sincere appreciation to the founding lab members for their exceptional patience and collaborative spirit. 🤝🌱

The establishment of a new research laboratory has provided me with an unexpected master class in bureaucratic navigation—a skill notably absent from our scientific curricula. 📋 Modern research leadership, I've discovered, requires impressive versatility: functioning simultaneously as scientific visionary, mentor, coder, project manager, grant writer, administrative coordinator, equipment technician, website designer, and occasional furniture mover. 🔬🧠💻📊✍️📑🔧🪑

With the guidance of the Prof. Mohamed Mehiri, I have surprisingly developed some ability to decipher multi-institutional administrative layers—systems complex enough to serve as benchmarks for testing next-generation AI capabilities. 🧩 Often, the pursuit of efficiency within these systems feels like an elusive goal.

Despite securing substantial research funding, these administrative complexities/inefficiency require considerable effort to navigate. Nevertheless, I strive to maintain a sense of humor and perspective. After all, what is science without the occasional existential crisis while providing identical information in yet another slightly different format? 💰😅🔄

For new laboratory leaders reading this: I recommend allocating approximately 30% of your time to administrative matters and a valuable 10% to considering how these processes might be improved (should you have the opportunity to influence these mechanisms later). ⏱️ The remaining time can then be dedicated to managing the lab and to the scientific questions that inspired your engagement in the first place (preparing research proposal is at the center of that).

The reality is that maintaining scientific productivity while navigating these administrative complexities often requires extending working hours significantly—a solution that inevitably compromises work-life balance. ⚖️ The dual pressure to achieve excellence in both scientific innovation and administrative management creates a system where personal time becomes the primary sacrifice, particularly for early-career research leaders establishing their laboratories. This challenge presents an especially narrow margin for those with young children and active spouse, who must balance family responsibilities with the demanding expectations of academic advancement and laboratory management. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 My response to this challenge is to maximize operational efficiency and fostering collaborative team dynamics among laboratory members. 🤝

While we collectively aspire to more sustainable academic practices, the current environment often demands this difficult compromise. I remain hopeful that soon AI-transformation will alleviate some of this administrative burden for the next generation of researchers, allowing them to dedicate more time to the scientific questions that truly matter while maintaining healthy work-life boundaries. 🤖🔮

Research funding is fundamental to innovative scientific endeavors, and our journey has included both challenges and successes. Despite three time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful applications to European Commission 🇪🇺 programs (one ERC Starting Grant and two EIC Pathfinder proposals), we have successfully secured important regional and national support. These funding sources have enabled the experimental components necessary for implementing our research vision. 🎯

We are particularly grateful for the support received from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and regional authorities 🇫🇷, which has allowed us to establish essential laboratory infrastructure. Additionally, our computational and AI-focused projects are now moving forward at a more ambitious scale thanks to the collaborative ANR/SNF project detailed below.

We're thrilled to announce the official commencement of the MetaboLinkAI project on April 1st, 2025 (no joke), an international research consortium co-funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation 🇨🇭 and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche 🇫🇷. This ambitious initiative brings together eight leading institutions to develop open, integrative AI and knowledge graph frameworks for metabolomics research. I am really honored to serve as co-coordinator for this project alongside Prof. Nicola Zamobni of ETH Zurich. The HolobiomicsLab is responsibile for leading the development of the metabolomics AI assistant.

The first collaborative workshops are being scheduled, and we look forward to building a vibrant international community around this initiative. Researchers interested in contributing to MetaboLinkAI are encouraged to contact us—we firmly believe in the power of collaboration over competition in advancing scientific discovery.

In the coming months, we anticipate significant progress on several fronts: publishing our research 📝, bringing our instruments online ⚙️, welcoming new team members 👋, establishing key experimental protocols 🧪, and advancing new research projects 🚀. We look forward to sharing these developments as the HolobiomicsLab continues to evolve.