People-centred funding as a catalyst for sustainable imaging infrastructure

Advanced imaging core facilities are critical pillars of modern life sciences research, providing access to complex technologies, specialised expertise, and training. At the heart of these facilities are Imaging Scientists, whose work spans technology development, operations, training, data stewardship, and community coordination. Despite their central role, Imaging Scientists have rarely been the focus of coordinated funding at scale. Here, we evaluate the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist program-to our knowledge, one of the first large-scale efforts to support this workforce-through an anonymous survey and selected case profiles across diverse institutional, technical, and geographic contexts. Survey responses highlight the program's value in enabling structurally underfunded activities such as technology integration, scalable training, leadership, and community building. By abstracting across cases, we identify recurring impact themes, showing how support for Imaging Scientists strengthens core facility foundations, accelerates adoption of new technologies, and fosters national and international networks. These findings illustrate that investing in Imaging Scientists generates measurable scientific-, institutional-, and community-level returns, complementing technology-focused funding and maximising the impact of research investments.