Elected as President during the ECCO General Annual Meeting on June 14th, 2019 in Torino, Italy. The European Culture Collections’ Organisation (ECCO, www.eccosite.org) was founded as a non-profit organisation in 1981 with the mission to support the interests of European culture collections of microorganisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, and cell lines of plant, animal and human origin) and help them to improve scientific and technical standards in close collaboration with the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC, www.wfcc.info). Furthermore, it endeavours to inform and support users of material maintained by microbial collections. To date 76 culture collections from 26 European countries are member of ECCO.