At the start of every academic year, members of the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Plant Health Biotechnology (CPHB) management committee meet for a two-day strategy session to plan for the year ahead. A student report back session follows where the leadership team has the opportunity to discuss new initiatives and plans for the year ahead. The 2025 report back session was held on 31 January in the University of Pretoria’s Sanlam Auditorium, attended by approximately 150 postgraduate students, research Fellows and staff members. FABI Director Prof. Bernard Slippers opened the session with an inspiring talk focussed on “looking ahead to the future and continuing to strive for research excellence”. He reminded FABIans that excellence is a journey and stressed the importance of planning to ensure continued research excellence and relevance.  Students also participated in an online activity where two word-clouds were created. The first of these was based on their selection of three words that they thought best described FABI and the second on what issues or research fields they thought would be important a decade from the present. Key words that emerged were similar in the two exercises and included Research, Excellence, Community, Collaborations, Innovation, Plant Health and Multidisciplinary.