We are pleased to announce winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Award” for the year 2025 in two categories:
Early Career Award –Tiago Lubiana, University of São Paulo, Brazil
The ISB congratulates Tiago Lubiana, from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, on receiving the 2025 Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award.
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.
Advanced Career Award – Kimberly Van Auken, California Institute of Technology, USA
The ISB congratulates Kimberly Van Auken, from the California Institute of Technology, USA, on receiving the 2025 Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award.
Kimberly Van Auken’s career reflects deep expertise, sustained innovation, and dedicated service to the biocuration community. With a foundation in C. elegans genetics and early experience in protein annotation, she has made impactful contributions to multiple high-profile projects, including WormBase, the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium, and the Alliance of Genome Resources. Her pioneering efforts in applying text mining to GO curation, particularly through the use of Textpresso and participation in BioCreative challenges, exemplify her forward-thinking approach to improving curation efficiency and quality.
As co-manager of the GO annotation group, Kimberly helped lead the development of the Noctua curation tool and the creation of GO-Causal Activity Models (GO-CAMs), transforming how biological processes are modeled and curated. Her leadership in transitioning WormBase literature infrastructure to the Alliance and her current role as lead of the Literature Working Group underscore her ability to guide large-scale, collaborative initiatives. She is also a member of the Alliance AI working group and a core contributor to the AI-assisted ACKnowledge community curation platform, promoting broader engagement in data annotation.
In addition to her technical achievements, Kimberly is a dedicated mentor and educator who actively supports community curation and biocuration training. She is a dependable and proactive colleague, known for her thoughtful collaboration and forward-looking vision. Her contributions continue to shape the standards, tools, and community practices that support high-quality biocuration.
Congratulations Tiago and Kimberly!
Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!
ISB Award subcommittee:
- Susan Bello
- M. Victoria Nugnes
- Sonia Balyan