EXCELLENCE IN BIOCURATION EARLY CAREER AWARD 2025

The Early Career Award recognizes biocurators who have been involved in a biocuration-relevant field for less than 7 years. The nominees are in a non-leadership position and have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration. The recipient will be required to present a 15 minute talk at a virtual Biocuration seminar and will be sent a prize of 500 CHF. The nominee does not have to be an active ISB member, as the award will include ISB membership for 1 year.

Voting will be open from 25 June – 23 July 2025

Nominees

The list of nominees is below. Scroll down for detailed descriptions.

  • Maria Cristina Aspromonte, University of Padova, Italy
  • Pawan Kumar, Indian Biological Data Centre, India
  • Tiago Lubiana, University of São Paulo, Brazil
  • Juan Mac Donagh, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina

Detailed Descriptions

Maria Cristina Aspromonte, University of Padova, Italy

Maria Cristina Aspromonte is a highly dedicated scientist whose contributions to the field of biocuration have been sustained. She is currently the resource manager and a curator of DisProt, a key manually curated database on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs). Since her PhD, she has made outstanding contributions to biocuration, including DisProt 7.0 version updates and the curation of clinical and sequencing data for the 5th and 6th editions of the CAGI challenge. As DisProt manager since 2022, she has coordinated expert and volunteer curation efforts, developed DisProt curation protocols and led training programs, including those on experimental techniques for interpreting IDPs. She is co–first author of the last DisProt publication and led the creation of five thematic curated datasets, covering topics from human diseases to biological processes and protein families. Her leadership in the ELIXIR IDPs Community and the HUPO-PSI IDP Working Group has advanced collaboration in ontology development and standardization. She is also a partner in an ELIXIR funded project dedicated to enhancing ontologies related to IDPs. Her active involvement in biocuration community-building is evident from her contributions to organizing and promoting curation training (Europe, Argentina, and Japan), both in-person and online. She was also actively involved in organizing the 16th International Biocuration Conference and the Gene Ontology Consortium Meeting, further demonstrating her commitment to building and strengthening the biocuration community.

Publications

  • DisProt in 2024: improving function annotation of intrinsically disordered proteins. Aspromonte MC, Nugnes MV, Quaglia F, Bouharoua A, DisProt Consortium, Tosatto SCE and Piovesan D (2023) Nucleic Acids Research, Database Issue. PubMed:37904585, DOI:10.1093/nar/gkad928
  • Best practices for the manual curation of intrinsically disordered proteins in DisProt. Quaglia F, Chasapi A, Nugnes MV, Aspromonte MC, Leonardi E, Piovesan D, Tosatto SCE. PubMed:38507044, DOI:10.1093/database/baae009
  • DisProt in 2022: improved quality and accessibility of protein intrinsic disorder annotation. Quaglia F et al., (2022) Nucleic Acids Research, database Issue. PubMed:34850135, DOI:10.1093/nar/gkab1082
  • The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2023. Gene Ontology Consortium (2023) Genetics. PubMed:36866529, DOI:10.1093/genetics/iyad031

Pawan Kumar, Indian Biological Data Centre, India

Dr. Pawan Kumar, Data Curator at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), has made outstanding contributions to structural and proteomic data curation through his leadership of the Indian Structural Data Archive (https://ibdc.dbtindia.gov.in/isda/) and Indian Proteome Databank (https://ibdc.dbtindia.gov.in/ipd/). Over the past four years, he has developed an in-house pipeline to curate 3D-macromolecular complexes with a focus on multi-targeted bioactive compound mining—critical for modern drug discovery (polypharmacology, and drug repurposing). His work integrates ligand-binding site annotations, Binding interaction comparison analysis across protein families, and linkage of binding sites to disease-associated genetic mutations.

Dr. Kumar has filled critical gaps in data resources by curating experimental binding affinities (Ki, IC50, EC50), particularly for protein–protein complexes, and by introducing interaction similarity analysis to enhance understanding of mutation impacts. His parallel efforts in bio-entity tagging and mining Medline abstracts/full texts offer valuable insights into molecular associations in the context of polypharmacology.

In addition to his technical accomplishments, Dr. Kumar actively promotes biocuration through education and outreach. He plays a key role in organizing and conducting training programs and workshops focused on proteomics data archival and submission at IPD. These efforts support capacity building and promoting best practices among early-career researchers and data submitters. He has also played a key role in developing the Structural Biology workbench of the Biological Data Analysis Toolbox, BioNode (formerly MATI; https://ibdc.dbtindia.gov.in/mati/). His leadership and dedication to both science and community training make him a strong and well-deserving nominee for recognition by the International Society for Biocuration.

Publications

Tiago Lubiana, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Dr. Tiago Lubiana is a passionate and motivated scientist with interest in linked open data, ontologies, the semantic web, and their application in modeling cells and cell types. These interests lead him to be active in international and multi-disciplinary projects such as Wikidata, the OBO Foundry, the Bioregistry and and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Notably, made impactful contributions to the Cell Ontology and Complex Portal projects and gave one of the first demonstrations of extending an OBO Foundry ontology with multiple language labels to bolster its accessibility to non-english speakers.

Further than his scientific contributions, Tiago also has been an active community member within the International Society for Biocuration by participating on the EDI Committee and on the organization committee for the 2023 Annual International Biocuration Conference in Padua, Italy. He continues to be an advocate for open science, open data, and EDI in his daily activities in Brazil.

Publications

Juan Mac Donagh, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina

My scientific career began almost simultaneously with the release of AlphaFold2. I was starting my PhD in bioinformatics, focused on the relationship between protein structure and function, when my niche topic suddenly became headline news. I felt excited by this powerful new tool and, somewhat childishly, discouraged—as if everything I had planned to discover had already been resolved. But my PhD advisor, Gustavo Parisi, reminded me of something he often tells his students: “Biology is in the details.” Millions of models can be generated, but understanding their relevance requires careful analysis.

Because of this, my thesis shifted slightly as I began studying biases in protein structure models. This resulted in two publications describing the limitations of AlphaFold2, both relying on heavily curated datasets to show how the tool still struggles to predict conformational diversity. I was also fortunate to collaborate with Toby Gibson, a pioneer in SLiMs, in curating the latest update of the ELM database. This approach came full circle through the ORFG awards, where I taught protein structure curation to scientists using our own database of conformational diversity, CoDNaS.

Studying details, identifying what’s missing, and contributing new knowledge is what curation is about. With the huge volumes of data now available, curation should be a top priority for scientists. With almost half of my PhD still ahead of me, the idea of curating and understanding different models of protein structure—with a special focus on conformational diversity—and building a strict ontology language has never been more exciting.

Publications

  • Revealing Missing Protein–Ligand Interactions Using AlphaFold Predictions – (Juan Mac Donagh, Nahuel Escobedo, Tadeo Saldaño, Luciana Rodriguez Sawicki, Nicolas Palopoli, Sebastian Fernandez Alberti, Maria Silvina Fornasari, Gustavo Parisi), Journal of Molecular Biology, Academic Press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2024.168852
  • Structured tandem repeats in protein interactions – (Juan Mac Donagh, Abril Marchesini, Agostina Spiga, Maximiliano José Fallico, Paula Nazarena Arrías, Alexander Miguel Monzon, Aimilia-Christina Vagiona, Mariane Gonçalves-Kulik, Pablo Mier, Miguel A Andrade-Navarr), International Journal of Molecular Sciences, MDPI, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms25052994
  • ELM—the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource—2024 update – (Manjeet Kumar, Sushama Michael, Jesús Alvarado-Valverde, András Zeke, Tamas Lazar, Juliana Glavina, Eszter Nagy-Kanta, Juan Mac Donagh, Zsofia E Kalman, Stefano Pascarelli, Nicolas Palopoli, László Dobson, Carmen Florencia Suarez, Kim Van Roey, Izabella Krystkowiak, Juan Esteban Griffin, Anurag Nagpal, Rajesh Bhardwaj, Francesca Diella, Bálint Mészáros, Kellie Dean, Norman E Davey, Rita Pancsa, Lucía B Chemes, Toby J Gibson), Nucleic acids research, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad1058
  • Impact of protein conformational diversity on AlphaFold predictions – (Tadeo Saldaño, Nahuel Escobedo, Julia Marchetti, Diego Javier Zea, Juan Mac Donagh, Ana Julia Velez Rueda, Eduardo Gonik, Agustina García Melani, Julieta Novomisky Nechcoff, Martín N Salas, Tomás Peters, Nicolás Demitroff, Sebastian Fernandez Alberti, Nicolas Palopoli, Maria Silvina Fornasari, Gustavo Parisi), Bioinformatics, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac202