Each 90-minute session features a mix of lightning talks, invited presentations, and panel discussions.
| Date | Theme | Important Links |
|---|---|---|
| February 9th, 2026 | Workshop on AI in Biocuration | Add to calendar |
| March 9th, 2026 | Talks + Panel Discussion – Curation Beyond Biocuration | Add to calendar |
| June 8th, 2026 | Virtual Poster Session | Submit an abstract |
| September 7th, 2026 | Talks + Panel Discussion – Careers in Biocuration | Submit an abstract |
About the Virtual Series
The 2026 Virtual Biocuration Conference Series continues the ISB’s mission to bring together biocurators, database developers, data scientists, and the broader research community – in a flexible, inclusive, and accessible format.
Following the success of our earlier virtual meetings (2021 – 2022), this series complements our in-person conferences. While in-person meetings remain invaluable for networking and collaboration, virtual sessions allow ISB to:
- Reach a global audience regardless of travel restrictions or financial constraints.
- Provide more frequent, shorter sessions throughout the year rather than a single intensive event.
- Offer an accessible forum for early-career researchers to share their work and connect with leaders in the field.
- Facilitate community-wide discussions on emerging topics in biocuration, data standards, sustainability, and professional development.
The 2026 series is free to attend: registration is open to anyone interested in biocuration and related fields.
Inclusivity and Community Focus
The ISB is committed to making biocuration as open, diverse, and inclusive as possible. Our virtual events aim to:
- Highlight contributions from underrepresented regions and disciplines.
- Encourage participation from students and early-career researchers – including opportunities to help organize, present, or moderate.
- Foster cross-disciplinary discussions beyond traditional biocuration boundaries (e.g., digital humanities, ecology, pharma data standards).
If you are interested in participating – as a speaker, panelist, or volunteer., then please submit an abstract.
Session 0 – February 9th
Add to your calendar with: https://calendar.app.google/6n6HmdGEyUgxg7368.
Join on Zoom with: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89854735663?pwd=LvtwhJE9gJinR2d5lRSY2ybbTfF0gN.1&jst=2
Following the AI in Biocuration Workshop at the 18th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Kansas City in April, 2025 and discussions at the ISB’s 2025 Annual General Meeting, many community members expressed interest in creating a forum for discussing the usage of AI in biocuration. Therefore, we are organizing a virtual workshop series on AI in Biocuration which will focus its usage in practice through hands-on demonstrations and community discussions.
This workshop comprises a salutation, four talks/demos, and a community discussion segment:
- Marc Gillespie (Reactome) – welcome on behalf of the ISB
- Christopher Mungall (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) – Staying in the Loop: A Biocurator’s Guide to Agentic AI Developments
- Pengyuan Li (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)– CurateBench: Evaluating LLMs on evidence-based, ontology-aligned biocuration tasks
- Aleix Puig (EBI) – Automating ontology curation with multi-Agent systems
- Christopher J. Tabone (The Jackson Laboratory) – Multi-Agent Architecture for Scalable Literature Curation
- Discussion
Session 1 – March 9th
Add to your calendar with https://calendar.app.google/hnRVAScBXpgXB7tL7.
Join on Zoom with https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86224306996?pwd=am30bN9MdcCfNzJqLJvwC5X8VIw7jE.1.
There will be three lightning talks (3 minutes each) and one invited talk (15 minutes) TBA followed by a panel discussion Curation Beyond Biocuration with panelists:
- Joy Owango (University of Nairobi, Africa PID Alliance; digital humanities)
- Damiano Testa (University of Warwick; mathematics)
- Gavin Michael Farrell (University of Padua; machine learning)
- Samantha Pearman-Kanza (University of Southampton, Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI); physical sciences)
Session 2 – June 8th
| April 8, 2026 | Poster presenters announced |
Session 3 – September 7th
| July 7, 2026 | Talks and panelists confirmed |
Stay Connected!
Follow ISB updates on Slack, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon or get in touch at isb@biocurator.org.
Organizers
This year’s virtual biocuration conference series is being organized by Federica Quaglia (Uni. Padova) and Charles Tapley Hoyt (RWTH Aachen). If you’d like to get involved, please shoot us an email at isb@biocurator.org.