Virtual Biocuration Conference Series 2026

Each 90-minute session features a mix of lightning talks, invited presentations, and panel discussions.

DateThemeImportant Links
February 9th, 2026Workshop on AI in BiocurationAdd to calendar
March 9th, 2026Talks + Panel Discussion – Curation Beyond BiocurationAdd to calendar
May 7th, 2026Talks + Discussion –
AI in Biocuration (second session in the 2026 series)		Add to calendar
June 15th, 2026 PostponedVirtual Poster Session Submit an abstract (rolling submissions until June 8th)
September 14th, 2026Talks + Panel Discussion – Careers in BiocurationSubmit an abstract (rolling submissions until August)
October 22nd, 2026Annual General meeting and Award talks
All sessions start at 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 4pm BST/CET, 8.30pm IST
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.

Submit An Abstract

February 9th – AI in Biocuration Workshop

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:

  1. Marc Gillespie (Reactome) – welcome on behalf of the ISB
  2. Christopher Mungall (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) – Staying in the Loop: A Biocurator’s Guide to Agentic AI Developments
  3. Pengyuan Li (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)– CurateBench: Evaluating LLMs on evidence-based, ontology-aligned biocuration tasks
  4. Aleix Puig (EBI) – Automating ontology curation with multi-Agent systems
  5. Christopher J. Tabone (The Jackson Laboratory) – Multi-Agent Architecture for Scalable Literature Curation
  6. Discussion

March 9th – Curation Beyond Biocuration

Add to your calendar with https://calendar.app.google/hnRVAScBXpgXB7tL7.
Join on Zoom with https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86224306996?pwd=am30bN9MdcCfNzJqLJvwC5X8VIw7jE.1.

First, there will be three lightning talks (3 minutes each) and one long talk (15 minutes) highlighting atypical (bio)curation scenarios across linguistics, archaeology, and more:

  1. Francesca Masini (University of Bologna, lightning talk) – When your data talks back: Data curation in linguistics
  2. Vanessa Baratella (University of Ljubljana, lightning talk) – From Linguistic Diversity to Data Interoperability: Archaeological Challenges for Harmonizing Terminology and Knowledge Organization
  3. Sebastian Duesing (La Jolla Institute for Immunology, lightning talk)
  4. Emilie Pasche (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, long talk) – From SIBiLS to BiodiversityPMC: a PMC superset with advanced functionalities

Second, there will be a panel discussion Curation Beyond Biocuration with panelists:

  1. Joy Owango (University of Nairobi, Africa PID Alliance; digital humanities)
  2. Damiano Testa (University of Warwick; mathematics)
  3. Gavin Michael Farrell (University of Padua; machine learning)
  4. Samantha Pearman-Kanza (University of Southampton, Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI); physical sciences)

May 7th – AI in Biocuration (second session)

Add to your calendar with: https://calendar.app.google/duRHNms5Ko1kvbkKA
Join on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89145525930pwd=hp8YricshzFfADwdM28qpCHfqoCzl7.1
Time: Starts at 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 4pm BST/CET, 8.30pm IST (90 mins)

Following our successful first session of the “AI in Biocuration” series in Feb 2026, we are having the second session of this series. This session will continue the focus on AI usage in practice through hands-on demonstrations and community discussions.

  1. Marc Gillespie (Reactome) and Ranjana Kishore (Alliance of Genome Resources/WormBase)– welcome and introduction to speakers on behalf of the ISB
  2. Lisa Mathews (Reactome) – Using LLMs as a Reactome curator tool, while keeping curators firmly in the loop
  3. Olivia Haley (Oakridge Institute for Science and Education) – Beyond FAIR: Advancing towards AI-Readiness at MaizeGDB
  4. Christopher J. Tabone (The Jackson Laboratory) – Multi-Agent Architecture for Scalable Literature Curation – Part 2
  5. Discusssion

June 15th Postponed – Virtual Poster Session

Rolling announcement of acceptancePoster acceptances will be sent out starting June 1

The poster session will be held using Gather.town. Posters should be sent to isb@biocurator.org no later than June 14th. The poster image should be a .png or .jpg file that’s at least 1000 x 600 px and no larger than 3 MB. See Gather’s poster file tips for more information. Multiple submissions (i.e., abstracts) are allowed and encouraged. If you’re attending the in-person conference in Cape Town, we also encourage you to present the same poster again virtually!

Submit An Abstract

September 7th – Careers in Biocuration Workshop

July 7, 2026Talks and panelists confirmed

October 22nd – Annual General Meeting

Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2026

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). The AI in Biocuration virtaul series is being organized by Marc Gillespie (St. John’s University) and Ranjana Kishore (Caltech). If you’d like to get involved, please shoot us an email at isb@biocurator.org.