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 on June, 1, 2026 until June 12, 2026.
NOMINEES
- Pascal Carme, University of Cambridge
- Kathiyayini Jayaraman, Kriyadocs, Olympia Cyberspace, Guindy, Chennai, India
- Nancy Ontiveros-Palacios, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK
Detailed Descriptions
Pascal Carme, University of Cambridge
Pascal Carme has been a curator at PomBase for only just over 2 years, but he has quickly established himself as a critical member of the PomBase team. Since joining, he has taken on a substantial share of the community curation review workload, and is now the primary developer of the fission yeast phenotype ontology (FYPO). He is a major contributor to our GO-CAM modelling projects, having created or contributed to more than 50 pathway models. He has also supervised undergraduate students at UCL on GO-CAM modelling projects. He is responsible for the technical review of PomBase micropublications. He also manages the hosting of sequence-based datasets in JBrowse. Pascal has developed a series of outreach seminars, “Just One Thing”, presented through the Pombe Talks seminar series. These sessions highlight specific PomBase features and help users make more effective use of the resource, covering topics such as ontologies, GO-CAMs, and search functionality. He was the lead author of the recent PomBase resource update in Genetics journal.
Publications:
- PomBase in 2026: expanding knowledge, modelling connections. PMID: 41518600
Kathiyayini Jayaraman, Kriyadocs, Olympia Cyberspace, Guindy, Chennai, India
Kathiyayini is a biocurator with a strong academic background in Biochemistry and a growing contribution to the field of biocuration. After completing her M.Sc in Biochemistry, she began her professional journey as a Biocurator in 2019, where she developed expertise in biological data analysis, annotation, and data interpretation. Over time, she strengthened her subject knowledge and analytical skills to under complex biological data and present it in a clear, accurate, and meaningful manner. Her work has enhanced her ability to maintain data, follow curation standards, and contribute effectively to scientific databases and knowledge resources. She is passionate about the role of biocuration in supporting biological research and making scientific information accessible to the research community. As an early-career professional, she continues to learn and improve her skills while contributing responsibly and efficiently to the field. As a Curator at Kriyadocs, she works for Dryad, a reputed digital repository. Her role involves curating datasets to ensure data integrity, quality, and accessibility for the research community. She also communicate effectively with authors and researchers to clarify raw data and metadata requirements, ensuring that datasets meet repository standards and remain useful for future scientific research.
Contributor/Curator for the Dryad blog post: https://blog.datadryad.org/2025/10/30/why-choose-dryad/ published on the Dryad website.”
Nancy Ontiveros-Palacios, EMBL-EBI,Wellcome Genime Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge UK
Nancy holds a Master’s degree in Science and is currently a PhD candidate in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Since 2020, when she joined the EMBL-EBI as a biocurator for Rfam, she has been dedicated to this role in which she reviews and updates Rfam secondary structure consensus of ncRNA families. She uses 3D structure information, MSAs, secondary structure prediction and covariance, RNA literature and different criteria after searches of RNA families in non redundant genomes database. She has been the only contributor to curation of RNA families for this database, updating and creating new entries when possible. She is very passionate about this role and maintains the accuracy of the information available for users, applying her knowledge and experience in the field. In these past years, she had made invaluable contributions to the database, taken part in conferences and events to show the great work at Rfam and the improvements they are constantly doing to the service. She also takes part in public engagement, participating in activities involving the public to learn about science. Particularly, she was part in activities with children, to spread her enthusiasm about RNAs and science. She should be recognised for her hard work at Rfam, being the only biocurator in the database.
Publications: