The SIMS Europe was initiated in 1998 by Alfred Benninghoven from the University of Muenster with the idea of holding a scientific meeting on SIMS in a very compact and cost-effective format. This was intended to enable young researchers and students in particular to participate. While the first seven conferences were chaired by Benninghoven himself, Heinrich Arlinghaus, Uwe Karst and the local SIMS team later organised the conferences.
In 2020, the meeting had to be cancelled due to the Corona pandemic, and in 2022, the conference had to be postponed to 2023 due to the rescheduling of the
international SIMS conference. The local organising committee discussed the future of the conference with the University of Münster, but the university was not able to provide the infrastructure
and staff at that time. Therefore, the local organising committee was very happy that David Scurr from the University of Nottingham agreed at short notice to host the workshop in 2023 and to
continue the very successful conference series.
During the conference in Nottingham, it was decided to hold the next meeting from September 7 to 9, 2025 at the University of Giessen. The workshop will be organised by Anja Henss, Marcus Rohnke
and Michael Dürr. It was also decided to use the time until the next meeting to set up a scientific steering committee for SIMS Europe and to enable other European SIMS groups to host future
meetings. David Scurr and Arnaud Delcorte were asked to take care of this process.