UK-EPMA was developed in 2018 when UKRI announced a review into the country's research infrastructure. EPMA had previously been recognised as one of many individual analytical techniques installed across a range of institutions and industries. The UKRI review afforded an opportunity for the community to come together under a single banner. This venture was borne out of a series of successful recent JEOL user meetings which had take place in the previous 7 years. That particular meeting had itself developed from both much earlier UK based Cameca user meetings going back several decades and the involvement of several UK-based EPMA experts in EMAS - The European Microbeam Analysis Society.

The UKRI review involved two questionnaires in 2018 and 2019. Input into these came from nine country-wide EPMA laboratories and was compiled and submitted by Stuart Kearns from Bristol. The consequence of this is an entry into the 2019 UKRI research and innovation infrastructure portal (https://www.infraportal.org.uk) which identifies those laboratories who chose to engage with the process.

Following a successful EMAS workshop in Microbeam Analysis in th Earth Sciences in 2018, a small budget has been established, hosted in Bristol to support UK-EPMA activities. Our goals are four-fold: To advance EPMA as a fundamental technique of advanced materials characterization; to continue to capture innovations that will deliver the world-class data demanded by our academic and industrial partners; to underpin teaching of the next generation of materials scientists in the field of EPMA, in particular the correct interpretation of data; and to raise the awareness of funding bodies of who we are, what we do and, crucially, what we can offer the UK R&D community through highlighting the centres of microanalytical excellence that exist in UK institutions and UK industry.