eSSENCE is organised by the universities of Uppsala, Lund, and Umeå.

eSSENCE unites and supports research within e-Science. Unlike most other research areas, e-Science is not based on disciplines or on the subject matter being studied, but on the tools used, which, as the name implies, are of an “electronic” nature. e-Sciences comprise all sciences that progress and answer scientific questions through the advanced application of computers, storage, and/or networks. Within these sciences, tools to support research are established through method development with respect to, e.g., modelling and simulation, algorithms, databases, data management and workflows.

An eSSENCE strategy is to promote collaboration. By bringing research groups together with a focus on e-scientific methods, a platform for exchange and knowledge transfer is created, for example, through adapting established methods for their application in new areas, or by developing common solutions to similar problems within different areas.

The research within eSSENCE in Lund spans length scales from the subnano range to light years. There are theoretical studies of proteins, e.g., structure refinement and self-assembly, and of nanomaterials for conversion of light into electricity as well as the development of techniques to analyse experimental data from measurements on this scale. Within medicine, machine learning is investigated as a means to extract information from published texts, perform cancer diagnosis and match donors and recipients for organ transplantation. Other projects learn from animals, such as, the study of bird feathers to improve wing design, the visual processing and brain activities as models for computer vision and autonomous action-based learning, respectively, and the analysis of echolocation of dolphins. Large distances are involved in the analysis of carbon dioxide flux and improved climate models, e.g., regarding land and vegetation. Beyond the scale of the Earth is the analysis of stellar spectra from the Milky Way.