The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) will hold its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Monday, October 27th, 2025 along with presentations by our two biocurator career award winners, Tiago Lubiana and Kimberly Van Auken.
Note that daylight savings begins in Europe/UK on October 26th and daylight savings begins on November 2nd in the USA, so there’s a slightly different offset than usual. All canonical times for this event are based on European time!
Please fill out this form to register to attend by Sunday, October 26th, 2025 and receive the meeting link.
This meeting will be recorded, by attending the meeting you are agreeing to be recorded. The recording will be available on the ISB website after the meeting.
Schedule (in CET):
4:00pm Sue Bello: ISB Annual General Meeting
4:30pm Open for questions and suggestions from attendees
5:45pm Tiago Lubiana, winner of the Early Career Award
5:10pm Kimberly Van Auken, winner of the Advanced Career Award
Register here You do not need to be an active ISB member to attend
It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the 2025 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award: Ruth Lovering, University College London, UK
The ISB congratulates Ruth Lovering, from University College London, UK, on receiving the 2025 Exceptional Contributions to Biocuration – Lifetime Achievement Award
Ruth has been an active member of the Biocuration community for over 25 years, significantly raising the profile of Biocuration and Bioinformatics as a Professor at University College London (UCL).
Ruth has contributed extensively to the curation of key resources such as HGNC, Gene Ontology (GO), and IMEx, and has been instrumental in developing curation standards, notably for pioneering the functional annotation of microRNAs and contributing to curation guidelines for transcription factors with the GREEKC Consortium.
Ruth established the Functional Gene Annotation Initiative in 2008, securing funding for cardiovascular, neurological, and microRNA annotation projects, and collaborating widely beyond her home department. Her work has led to numerous publications and real-world applications, and has included outreach to Parkinson’s patients and funders to highlight the value of curation.
Ruth was a prominent member of the GO Consortium, pushing forward standards and providing a significant proportion of human GO annotations. Ruth has organised and led multiple GO-annotation workshops for researchers alongside a popular UCL Bioinformatics MSc course. She is deeply committed to education and mentorship, supporting MSc students in gaining authorships, and actively encouraging curators to pursue career advancement, teaching qualifications, and publications.
Having served four years on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration, even after her recent retirement, Ruth continues to maintain UCL’s GO annotations, demonstrating her dedication to the Biocuration Community. Given her prolific contributions, leadership, mentorship, and ongoing commitment, Ruth Lovering is a highly deserving candidate for this award recognizing her lifetime achievements in Biocuration.
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 theUniversity 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 theCalifornia 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.
Voting will be open from June 25th – July 23rd, 2025
This year ISB is awarding Early, Advanced, and Lifetime Achievement Biocuration Awards. All active ISB members may vote for the nominees. Active members should receive an email with their individual ballot link. The email will be sent to the address associated with your ISB account. If you become a member during the voting period, please reach out to us to receive a ballot.
The Executive Committee of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is pleased to open the call to host the 20th International Biocuration Conference in Asia/Oceania, preferably during April or May 2027, though nearby dates may also be considered.
Individuals and organizations interested in applying may do so by sending a proposal to the ISB Executive Committee (intsocbio@gmail.com) on or before August 31st, 2025.
The successful bidder will be notified by October 1st, 2025. The ISB Executive Committee will publicly announce the selected organization or individuals during the Annual General Meeting held virtually in October.
Applicants may later be asked to provide further details about the proposed venue, proposed dates, strategies for broad community engagement and fair gender representation, and more.
In a continued effort to bring our meeting to curators in all geographic regions, we encourage ISB members across the Asia/Oceania region to put forward proposals to bring the ISB meeting to your region once again, or for the first time!
This survey aims to gather and analyze information about the field of biocuration.
This survey is being conducted by the International Society for Biocuration (ISB) to identify potential gaps or inequities among biocurators and to identify areas where the ISB may be able to take actions to improve awareness of biocuration.
This is a follow-up with our community to assess the progress made since the we began surveying the community in 2017. The results from past surveys are available here: https://www.biocuration.org/dissemination/survey-results/ (see ISB Career Description Survey Results).
The resulting data will be aggregated and analyzed and shared with the community. No identifying information will be revealed in reporting results of this survey.
Thank you for your participation. The survey will close Friday, March 28th, 2025
Do you have examples of publications or preprints describing scientific advances made using curated data from your resource? Let ISB know and we will promote these on our social media platforms. We want to make sure the hard work of curators does not go unnoticed.
Use this form to submit your examples and we will post to the ISB social media platforms.
The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is committed to working to build an inclusive and diverse network of biocurators, ontologists, data stewards and others who work to improve the quality of data wherever they may work. The EDI subcommittee has worked hard to establish a set of guidelines to promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility for the society. With these guidelines in place and with the difficulty in maintaining an active committee in the past year the executive committee has decided to establish an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Officer.
This officer will be charged with:
Acting as a point person for ISB members to communicate EDIA concerns.
Reviewing applications for Biocuration conference organizers for any EDIA concerns.
Working with the Biocuration conference liaison to ensure the annual conference is following EDIA guidelines.
Acting as a point person to think ahead for any potential EDIA blindspots.
The past few years have seen the first Biocuration conference in India (2024), the first fully hybrid Biocuration conference (2025), and plans for the first Biocuration conference in Africa (2026). We fund travel fellowships to enable curators from low-income countries to attend Biocuration conferences, We have increased the number of available microgrants and inclusivity grants available to members this year to two of each type. We have also revised and updated our guidelines for conference organizers.
We thank Mary Ann Tuli and the members of the EDI committee for their tireless work over the years to guide the society policies to where they are now.
We thank Luana Licata for volunteering to be the inaugural EDIA Officer!
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