EXCELLENCE IN BIOCURATION ADVANCED CAREER AWARD 2026

The Advanced Career Award recognizes biocurators who have been involved in a biocuration-relevant field for 7 years or more. The nominees will 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 includes ISB membership for 1 year.

Voting will be open from 1 June – 12 June 2026

NOMINEES

  • Shailesh Kumar, BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India
  • Antonina Andreeva, EMBL-EBI, UK
  • Steven Marygold, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Bastian Fromm, The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
  • Sabrina Toro, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
  • Parul Gupta, Oregon State University, USA
  • Scott V Nguyen, American Type Culture Collection, USA

Detailed Descriptions

Shailesh Kumar, BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India

Shailesh developed curated biological databases, computational pipelines, and AI-driven bioinformatics resources for plant genomics and non-coding RNA research. It includes organizing, annotating, and functionally interpreting large-scale multi-omics datasets to advance plant functional genomics by using machine learning and high-performance computing. He developed several important databases and analytical platforms, including PtRNAdb, PtncRNAdb, PbtRF, PtRFdb, and tncRNA for tRNA fragments, which are regulatory molecules involved in plant stress responses and genome regulation. Another two databases, PFusionDB and AtFusionDB, are developed to identify and characterize plant fusion transcripts, another important molecule having various functions in plants, including grain size and stress-responsive genome regulation. Further, he extensively performed the data curation by using mostly publicly available datasets, and developed databases like athisomiRDB for Arabidopsis isomiRs, ANNInter for ncRNA interaction networks, rsRNAfinder for ribosomal RNA-derived small RNA annotation, and CoNCRAtlas for cotton non-coding RNAs. Furthermore, Shailesh has also developed a database, a web server, and a toolkit for identification, annotation, and designing plant-based therapeutic peptides by using genomics datasets and ML models. These freely available resources provide systematically curated datasets and user-friendly interfaces for researchers worldwide. His publications and database resources have enhanced the accessibility and reliability of plant genomic information for the scientific community. He has organized more than seven national and international workshops/symposia, trained over 40 undergraduate and postgraduate students along with researchers from institutions across India, and delivered over 30 invited lectures in India and abroad. A total of 15 lab alumni settled abroad for their PhD and postdoctoral positions. Link: https://nipgr.ac.in/nipgrv4/dr-shailesh-kumar/.

Publications

  • Vivek AT, Kiran H, Sahu N, Kalakoti G, Kumar S*. Integrative multi-omics analysis widens annotation and functional insights into long non-coding RNAs of Arabidopsis thaliana. Biol Direct 21, 14 (2026). PMID: 41491960.
  • Swain SP, Bisht N, and Kumar S*. Comprehensive study of tRNA-derived fragments in plants for biotic stress responses. Funct Integr Genomics 25, 70 (2025). PMID: 40131555
  • Chitkara P, Singh A, Gangwar R, Bhardwaj R, Zahra S, Arora S, Hamid F, Arya A, Sahu S, Chakraborty S, Ramesh M and Kumar S*. The landscape of fusion transcripts in plants: a new insight into genome complexity. BMC Plant Biol 24, 1162 (2024). PMID: 39627690.
  • Kalakoti G, Vivek AT, Kamboj A, Singh A, Chakraborty S, Kumar S*. Comprehensive profiling of rRNA-derived small RNAs in Arabidopsis thaliana using rsRNAfinder pipeline. MethodsX, Volume 12, 2024, 102494. PMID: 38089152
  • Singh A, Zahra S, Poddar N and Kumar S.* Transfer RNA-derived non-coding RNAs (tncRNAs): hidden regulation of plants transcriptional regulatory circuits. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal. Volume 19, 2021, Pages 5278-5291. PMID: 34630945

Antonina Andreeva, EMBL-EBI, UK

Toni holds an MSc in Biotechnology from UCTM Sofia and a PhD in Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology from the University of Salzburg. After working as a research scientist and bioinformatics investigator, she spent 20 years at the MRC (Medical Research Council) in Cambridge — six years at the Centre for Protein Engineering and fourteen at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology — before joining EMBL-EBI in 2023 as a Scientific Curator for the Pfam and InterPro databases.
Toni has contributed to the biocuration field in numerous ways, primarily through her work with protein structures and her classification and description of novel folds, which has significantly advanced the community’s ability to identify evolutionary relationships and protein functions. Alongside Alexey Murzin, she worked on the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database, which hierarchically organises protein domains by structure into families, superfamilies, folds, and classes. SCOP has underpinned the development and benchmarking of countless bioinformatics tools and algorithms, while also supporting major advances in structural biology. Notably, the SCOP 2020 release was used by DeepMind to train AlphaFold2, and paper cited in the supplementary materials of their Nature publication — a testament to the database’s standing as one of the most important resources for classifying structural domains of proteins.
Throughout her career, Toni has collaborated with diverse research teams, bringing her remarkable expertise to bear on identifying and characterising new protein folds and their potential functions. In her current role as a Pfam curator, she is working to harmonise and resolve long-standing historical issues with clans (superfamilies), addressing subtle but important structural differences between closely related folds — the zinc fingers being one notable example.
Toni is also a gifted educator. When delivering training, she engages her audience with such passion and clarity that listeners feel they are being told a story; her enthusiasm for proteins, structures, functions, and especially novel discoveries is genuinely infectious. Across more than two decades of work, Toni deserves recognition for her outstanding contributions to the classification of protein structures, which have had a lasting impact on both the scientific community and the wider public.

Publications

  • Andreeva A, Howorth D, Brenner SE, Hubbard TJP, Chothia C, Murzin AG. SCOP database in 2004: refinements integrate structure and sequence family data. Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 32, Issue suppl_1, 1 January 2004, Pages D226–D229. PMID: 14681400
  • Andreeva A, Kulesha E, Gough J, Murzin AG. The SCOP database in 2020: expanded classification of representative family and superfamily domains of known protein structures. Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 48, Issue D1, 08 January 2020, Pages D376–D382. PMID: 31724711
  • Domingues FS, Lackner P, Andreeva A, Sippl MJ. Structure-based evaluation of sequence comparison and fold recognition alignment accuracy. Volume 297, Issue 4, 7 April 2000, Pages 1003-1013. PMID: 10736233
  • Andreeva A, Murzin AG. Evolution of protein fold in the presence of functional constraints. Current Opinion in Structural Biology. Volume 16, Issue 3, June 2006, Pages 399-408. PMID: 16650981
  • Andreeva A, Howorth D, Chandonia JM, Brenner SE, Hubbard TJP, Chothia C, Murzin AG. Data growth and its impact on the SCOP database: new developments. Nucleic Acids Res. Volume 36, Issue suppl_1, 1 January 2008, Pages D419–D425. PMID: 18000004

Steven Marygold, University of Cambridge, UK

Steven Marygold is Group Manager, curator and Nomenclature Advisor at FlyBase Cambridge (University of Cambridge, UK). He has made sustained, wide-ranging contributions to biocuration for more than 15 years.

Steven conceived and leads the FlyBase Gene Group resource, which provides expert-curated, logically organised and systematically named gene family data for Drosophila melanogaster has become a widely adopted model across model organism databases and inspired parallel resources at HGNC. A multi-year enzyme annotation project resulted in validated GO/EC annotations for 3,708 enzyme-encoding genes (26% of the proteome), detailed in two dedicated publications. Parallel systematic reviews of all 295 tRNA genes (with full informative nomenclature, co-developed with the GtRNAdb team) and all 1,112 transmembrane transporters demonstrate the same cover-all approach across diverse, previously underannotated gene classes. Steven is a major contributor to the Gene Ontology, identifying and reporting errors in catalytic and metabolic terms that propagate to dozens of downstream resources, and is actively involved in ontology development. He collaborates with Rhea, Reactome, RNACentral, UniProt, HGNC, and the Alliance of Genome Resources, amplifying the reach of his curation well beyond FlyBase. Steven is also driving the establishment of the FlyBase subscription model to cover the loss of US federal funding to the UK.

Steven’s career is a model of how rigorous, sustained expert biocuration impacts across the bioinformatics community, building lasting community-wide infrastructure.

Publications

  • Attrill H, Falls K, Goodman JL, Millburn GH, Antonazzo G, Rey AJ, Marygold SJ, FlyBase Consortium. “FlyBase: establishing a Gene Group resource for Drosophila melanogaster.” Nucleic Acids Research 44(D1):D786–D792 (2016). DOI:10.1093/nar/gkv1046
  • Garapati PV, Zhang J, Rey AJ, Marygold SJ. “Towards comprehensive annotation of Drosophila melanogaster enzymes in FlyBase.” Database 2019:bay144 (2019). DOI:10.1093/database/bay144
  • Marygold SJ, Chan PP, Lowe TM. “Systematic identification of tRNA genes in Drosophila melanogaster.” microPublication Biology 000560 (2022). DOI:10.17912/micropub.biology.000560
  • Garapati PV, Zaru R, Attrill H, dos Santos G, Goodman J, Thurmond J, Marygold SJ. “Comprehensive annotation of the enzymes of Drosophila melanogaster.” G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics 16(2):jkaf294 (2026). DOI:10.1093/g3journal/jkaf294
  • Öztürk-Çolak A, Marygold SJ, Antonazzo G, Attrill H, Goutte-Gattat D, Jenkins VK, Matthews BB, Millburn G, dos Santos G, Tabone CJ, FlyBase Consortium. “FlyBase: updates to the Drosophila genes and genomes database.” Genetics 227(1):iyad211 (2024). DOI:10.1093/genetics/iyad211

Bastian Fromm, The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Bastian Fromm is a museum-based evolutionary biologist and biocurator whose work has significantly advanced the quality, standardization, and evolutionary interpretability of microRNA annotations across the animal kingdom. He initiated this work during his PhD at the Natural History Museum in Oslo and has continued to develop and expand these community resources throughout his career, including in his current role as Professor in Zoology and Curator of Vertebrates at the Arctic University Museum of Norway.
Over the past decade, he has played a central role in the development and maintenance of MirGeneDB, a manually curated, evolutionarily informed microRNA reference database that has become an important international community resource for comparative genomics, functional biology, and RNA research. MirGeneDB is also integrated as an ELIXIR-associated bioinformatics service, supporting open and reproducible life science research infrastructure.
His contributions include the establishment of rigorous annotation standards for microRNAs, addressing widespread issues of false positives and inconsistent annotations in public repositories. These efforts culminated in influential community work advocating for higher quality biocuration practices and reproducible annotation standards. In parallel, he co-developed MirMachine, a scalable computational framework enabling high-quality microRNA annotation across thousands of genomes.
Beyond database development, he has contributed to training and outreach through workshops, bioinformatics courses, conference teaching activities, and the promotion of open, FAIR, and reproducible biocuration practices.
Through sustained community-focused efforts in database curation, standards development, software, mentoring, education, and international infrastructure building, Bastian Fromm has made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the field of biocuration.

Publications

  • Hackenberg M, Kalogeropoulos P, Peterson KJ, Friedländer MR, Fromm B. Knowing is not enough; we must apply: the case for rigorous microRNA annotation standards. Nucleic Acids Research. 2025. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf1049. PMID: 41118569.
  • Clarke AW, Høye E, Hembrom AA, Paynter VM, Vinther J, Wyrozzemski L, Biryukova I, Formaggioni A, Ovchinnikov V, Herlyn H, Pierce A, Wu C, Aslanzadeh M, Cheneby J, Martinez P, Friedländer MR, Hovig E, Hackenberg M, Umu SU, Johansen M, Peterson KJ, Fromm B. MirGeneDB 3.0: Improved taxonomic sampling, uniform nomenclature of novel conserved microRNA families, and updated covariance models. Nucleic Acids Research. 2025. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkae1094. PMID: 41118569.
  • Fromm B*, Høye E, Domanska D, Zhong X, Aparicio-Puerta E, Ovchinnikov V, Umu SU, Chabot PJ, Kang W, Aslanzadeh M, Tarbier M, Mármol-Sánchez E, Urgese G, Johansen M, Hovig E, Hackenberg M, Friedländer MR, Peterson KJ. MirGeneDB 2.1: toward a complete sampling of all major animal phyla. Nucleic Acids Res. 2022. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkab1101. PMID: 34850127.
  • Fromm B*, Domanska D, Høye E, Ovchinnikov V, Kang W, Aparicio-Puerta E,Johansen M, Flatmark K, Mathelier A, Hovig E, Hackenberg M, Friedländer MR,Peterson KJ. MirGeneDB 2.0: the metazoan microRNA complement. Nucleic Acids Res. 2020. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkz1016. PMID: 31642479.
  • Fromm B, Billipp T, Peck LE, Johansen M, Tarver JE, King BL, Newcomb JM, Sempere LF, Flatmark K, Hovig E, Peterson KJ. A Uniform System for the Annotation of Vertebrate microRNA Genes and the Evolution of the Human microRNAome. Annual Review of Genetics. 2015. doi: 10.1146/annurev-genet-120213-092023. PMID: 26473382.

Sabrina Toro, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Sabrina Toro is a transformative biocuration leader. As lead curator of the Mondo Disease Ontology, she has unified disease terms from resources such as OMIM, Orphanet, DO, and NCIT into a community-driven resource used by ClinGen, NORD, Every Cure, EMBL-EBI, and many more. Under her leadership, Mondo has become the venue where clinical expert communities such as the ClinGen Expert Panels and international epilepsy specialists negotiate consensus disease definitions.
Before Monarch, Sabrina was one of the team’s most prolific contributors at ZFIN, harmonizing zebrafish data from thousands of publications and learning ontology development to lighten the load on overburdened colleagues. She served as product owner for the Alliance of Genome Resources’ variant model and helped envision and develop the first-of-its-kind cross-MOD variant viewer, navigating delicate institutional dynamics surrounding shared data ownership with authority, kindness, and good humor.
Sabrina’s contributions to uPheno and HPO advanced cross-species phenotype integration; she co-created the Vertebrate Breed Ontology (19,500+ breeds across 49 species); and as PI on an NIEHS R24 grant, she leads the Zebrafish Phenotype Atlas. She co-led the evaluation of DRAGON-AI, a pioneering approach for AI-powered ontology curation.
As co-leader of the OBO Academy, she mentors the next generation of curators and co-led workshops at Biocuration and ICBO. She chaired the OBO Foundry Governance Committee (2021-2023), helped organize Biocuration 2023, and has served as Election Officer for the ISB Executive Committee elections (2022-2024).
Sabrina prioritizes community needs, embracing new technologies while holding them to the high standards her users deserve.

Publications

  • Vasilevsky NA, Toro S, Matentzoglu N, et al. Mondo: integrating disease terminology across communities. Genetics. 2025;232(4):iyaf215. PMID: 41052288
  • Toro S, Anagnostopoulos AV, Bello SM, et al. Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation of Ontologies using AI (DRAGON-AI). J Biomed Semantics. 2024;15(1):19. PMID: 39415214
  • Mullen KR, Tammen I, Matentzoglu NA, …, Toro S. The Vertebrate Breed Ontology: Toward Effective Breed Data Standardization. J Vet Intern Med. 2025;39(4). PMID: 40413720
  • Matentzoglu N, …, Toro S, …, Haendel MA, Mungall CJ, et al. The Unified Phenotype Ontology (uPheno): A framework for cross-species integrative phenomics. Genetics. 2025;229(1). PMID: 40048704
  • Putman TE, …, Toro S, …, Haendel MA, Munoz-Torres MC. The Monarch Initiative in 2024: an analytic platform integrating phenotypes, genes and diseases across species. Nucleic Acids Res. 2024;52(D1):D938-D949. PMID: 38000386

Parul Gupta, Oregon State University, USA

Dr. Parul Gupta is a Sr. Research Associate at Oregon State University. She is the senior biocurator of the Plant Reactome knowledgebase (plantreactome.gramene.org), who manually curates evidence-based metabolic, signaling, abiotic stress response, plant organ development, and gene regulatory networks for rice. She has curated over 100 pathways by synthesizing information from over 700 research articles. These pathways comprise ~600 manually curated reaction-like events, over 800 gene products, and 300 regulatory instances. Dr. Gupta took the initiative to develop a strategy for curating plant organogenesis, developmental pathways, and regulatory networks for the Plant Reactome knowledgebase. Additionally, she contributes to SOP development, database management, QA/QC, testing, and release cycles. She co-organized the International Conference on Biological Ontology (ICBO, 2018), two pathway curation jamborees (2017, 2018), and trained undergraduates for data collection, optimization/standardization, and pathway curation. From 2023-present, Dr. Gupta has been a member of two working groups (Data Reuse, NLP for Biocuration) of the AgBioData consortium (agbiodata.org), a consortium of agricultural biological databases and associated resources. She also served as a conference planning and organizing committee member for the 14th Annual Biocuration Conference held virtually in 2021. Dr. Gupta served as an ISB-EC member, chaired the award subcommittee, and served as membership officer from 2021 to 2024.

Publications

  • The Gene Ontology Consortium. The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2026. 2026.Nucleic Acids Research, 54(D1), D1779-D1792, gkaf1292. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1292
  • Olson A, Kumari S, Wei X, Chougule K, Lu Z, Tello-Ruiz MK, Kumar V, Van Buren P, Olson A, Kim C, Braynen J, Zhang L, Dyer S, Alvarez-Jarreta J, Saraf S, Contreras-Moreira B, Naamati G, Ernst C, Papatheodorou I, George N, Jaiswal P, Naithani S, Gupta P, Elser J, D’Eustachio P, Assmann SM, Ferrero-Serrano Á, Pasha A, Provart N, Gladman N, Ware D. Gramene 2025: expanded comparative genomics and pathway resources, integrated search, and pan-genome portals for crop research. 2026. Nucleic Acids Research, 54 (D1), D1720–D173. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1260
  • Gupta P, Elser J, Ganguli A, Hooks E, D’Eustachio P, Jaiswal P, Naithani S. Plant Reactome Knowledgebase: Empowering plant pathway exploration and OMICS data analysis. 2024. Nucleic Acids Research, 52(D1), D1538–D1547. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad1052
  • Yates AD, Allen J, Amode RM, Andrey AG, Barba M, Becerra A, Bhai J, Campbell LI,
    Martinez MC, Chakiachvili M, Chougule K, Christensen M, Contreras-Moreira B, Cuzick A, Da Rin Fioretto L, Davis P, H De Silva N, Diamantakis S, Dyer S, Elser J, Filippi CV, Gall A, Grigoriadis D, Guijarro-Clarke C, Gupta P, Hammond-Kosack KE, Howe KL, Jaiswal P, Kaikala V, Kumar V, Kumari S, Langridge N, Le T, Luypaert M, Maslen GL, Maurel T, Moore B, Muffato M, Mushtaq A, Naamati G, Naithani S, Olson A, Parker A, Paulini M, Pedro H, Perry E, Preece J, Quinton-Tulloch M, Rodgers F, Rosello M, Ruffier M, Sitnik V, Szpak M, Tate J, Tello-Ruiz MK, Trevanion SJ, Urban M, Ware D, Wei S, Williams G, Winterbottom A, Zarowiecki M, Finn RD, Flicek P. Ensembl Genomes 2022: An expanding genome resource for non-vertebrates. 2022. Nucleic Acids Research, 50(D1), D996–D1003. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkab1007
  • Naithani S, Gupta P, Preece J, D’Eustachio P, Elser JL, Garg P, Dikeman DA, Kiff J, Cook J, Olson A, Wei S, Tello-Ruiz MK, Mundo AF, Munoz-Pomer A, Mohammed S, Cheng T, Bolton E, Papatheodorou I, Stein L, Ware D, Jaiswal P. Plant Reactome: a knowledgebase and resource for comparative pathway analysis. 2020. Nucleic Acids Research, 48(D1), D1093-D1103. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkz996

Scott V Nguyen, American Type Culture Collection, USA

Dr. Scott Nguyen is a Senior Biocuration Scientist at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) whose work exemplifies rigorous, genome‑enabled biocuration in microbial systematics. In his current role, Dr. Nguyen curates authenticated microbial reference strains and associated genome assemblies that support valid publication, genome‑based reclassification, and long‑term nomenclatural stability.

He is a lead contributor to the ATCC Genome Portal (https://genomes.atcc.org), helping ensure that genomic data are taxonomically accurate, traceable to physical reference materials, and aligned with evolving standards in prokaryotic systematics. He also serves as curator for the Yersinia dataset in EnteroBase, enabling standardized, community‑accessible phylogenomic analyses and comparative workflows. His curation work has directly supported multiple genome‑based taxonomic revisions published in the IJSEM, including emended taxa and newly described species.

Dr. Nguyen contributes substantially to quality assurance and governance in biological data through his service on the International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP), including membership on an Ad Hoc Committee addressing challenges associated with nomenclatural change. These efforts directly influence how curated taxonomic data remain stable and interpretable over time. He also serves as an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Microbiology and is a frequent reviewer for systematics and genomics journals.

In addition, Dr. Nguyen has a strong record in mentoring and education, including academic teaching in applied microbial genomics, and is an active member of the International Society for Biocuration, where he promotes reproducible, standards‑driven approaches to biological curation.

Publications

  • Bouras, N., Dif, G., Belghit, S., Nguyen, S.V., Jacobs, J.L., Toumatia, O., Ebada, S.S., Nouioui, I. Genome-based reclassification of the genus Thermoanaerobacter: taxonomic emendations and new combinations. (2026). Anaerobe. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anaerobe.2026.103027
  • Nguyen, S.V., Escobar, V.H., Ali, S.S., Puthuveetil, N.P., Petrone, J.R., Kirkland, J.L., Gaffney, K., Tabron, C.L., Wax, N., Duncan, J., King, S., Marlow, R., Reese, A.L., Yarmosh, D.A., McConnell, HH., Fernandes, A.S., Bagnoli, J., Benton, B., Jacobs, J.L.. Reclassification of atypical Moraxella catarrhalis ATCC 23246 as Moraxella veridica sp. nov. (2025). International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.006797
  • The ATCC genome portal: 3,938 authenticated microbial reference genomes SV Nguyen, NP Puthuveetil, JR Petrone, JL Kirkland, K Gaffney, … Microbiology resource announcements 13 (2), e01045-23
  • Nguyen, S.V., Edwards, D., Vaughn, E.L., Escobar, V., Ali, S., Doss, J.H., Steyer, J.T., Scott, S., Bchara, W., Bruns, N., Zelaya, E., Tran, A., Payne, D., Hauser, J.R. Expanding the Stenotrophomonas maltophilia complex: phylogenomic insights, proposal of Stenotrophomonas forensis sp. nov. and reclassification of two Pseudomonas species. (2024). International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.006602
  • Nguyen, S.V., Muthappa, D.M., Hurley, D., Donoghue, O., McCabe, E., Anes, J., Schaffer, K., Murphy, B.P, Buckley, J.F., & Fanning, S. (2019). Yersinia hibernica sp. nov., isolated from pig-production environments. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, 69(7), 2023-2027. doi: https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.003422

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