Tag: awards

2026 Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award Recipient

Congratulations to Steven Marygold this year’s Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career award recipient!

Steven has been group manager, curator and nomenclature advisor at FlyBase (flybase.org) for 20 years. During this time, he has made sustained, wide-ranging contributions to biocuration within FlyBase and the wider community in areas ranging from genetic, functional and disease model annotation, to bibliography management and ontology development. His work is described in over 40 publications.

Steven conceived the FlyBase Gene Group resource, which provides expert-curated, logically organised and systematically named gene family data for Drosophila melanogaster. This included a multi-year enzyme annotation project to review and validate GO/EC annotations for ~3,800 enzyme-encoding genes (26% of the proteome), detailed in two dedicated publications. That work led to the generation of FlyCyc, which provides a computed model of Drosophila metabolism, and an ongoing project to manually curate fly metabolic pathways as GO causal activity models (GO-CAMs). Steven also catalogued all ~4,000 ncRNA genes of Drosophila and coordinated their submission to RNAcentral, further demonstrating his cover-all approach to reviewing diverse, previously under-annotated gene classes. Steven is a major contributor to the Gene Ontology, identifying and reporting errors in catalytic and metabolic terms/annotations that propagate to dozens of downstream resources, and is actively involved in ontology development as a GO editor. He collaborates with Rhea, BioCyc, Reactome, RNACentral, UniProt, HGNC and the Alliance of Genome Resources, amplifying the reach of his curation well beyond FlyBase. Steven is also coordinating the establishment of a FlyBase subscription model to cover the loss of US federal funding to the UK site.

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

Publications

  • Garapati PV, Zaru R, Attrill H, dos Santos G, Goodman J, Thurmond J, Marygold SJ. (2026) Comprehensive annotation of the enzymes of Drosophila melanogaster. G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics 16(2):jkaf294 DOI:10.1093/g3journal/jkaf294
  • Marygold SJ. (2025) FlyCyc: a Pathway/Genome Database for the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. https://biocyc.org/organism-summary?object=DMEL
  • 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. (2024) FlyBase: updates to the Drosophila genes and genomes database. Genetics 227(1):iyad211. DOI:10.1093/genetics/iyad211
  • Marygold SJ, Chan PP, Lowe TM. (2022) Systematic identification of tRNA genes in Drosophila melanogaster. microPublication Biology 000560. DOI:10.17912/micropub.biology.000560
  • Attrill H, Falls K, Goodman JL, Millburn GH, Antonazzo G, Rey AJ, Marygold SJ, FlyBase Consortium. (2016) FlyBase: establishing a Gene Group resource for Drosophila melanogaster. Nucleic Acids Research 44(D1):D786–D792. DOI:10.1093/nar/gkv1046

ORCID: 0000-0003-2759-266X

2026 Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award Recipient

Congratulations to Pascal Carme this year’s Excellence in Biocuration Early Career award recipient!

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

ORCID: 0009-0003-9059-1333

Biocuration Awards Nominations Open April 20th

Time to start thinking about nominating your friendly neighborhood biocurator (or yourself) for the ISB Biocuration Career Awards! This year we are awarding the Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards. The awards come with a monetary prize and a speaking slot at the ISB annual general meeting held virtually in late October.

Nominations will be open April 20th, 2026 and will close on May 15th, 2026

Please see the Biocuration Awards page for details.

Biocuration Awards Nominations Open Soon!

Time to start thinking about nominating your friendly neighborhood biocurator (or yourself) for the ISB Biocuration Career Awards! This year we are awarding the Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards. The awards come with a monetary prize and a speaking slot at the ISB annual general meeting held virtually in late October.

Nominations will officially open in mid-April and will be open for 1 month.

Please see the Biocuration Awards page for details.

Biocuration 2026 Travel Awards

The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is offering 5 in-person travel grants for the Biocuration 2026 Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

In-person awards cover up to 2,700 CHF in expenses, paid as reimbursements following the conference, meaning that awardees must pay their expenses and send receipts (including any for currency exchange costs) to the ISB following the conference.

In person awardees are also required to submit a recent photograph and a written report (minimum 100 words) about the outcomes of their attendance. These will be posted on the ISB website, newsletter, ISB mailing list, and promoted on social media (Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon).

All awardees are expected to present either a talk or poster at the conference.

If you are a current ISB member, please provide the email address associated with your ISB membership.

Deadline for applications: October 31st, 2025

Apply here

Ruth Lovering- Recipient of the 2025 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award

It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the 2025 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award:
Ruth Lovering, University College London, UK

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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.

Congratulations Ruth!

Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!

ISB Award subcommittee:

  • Susan Bello
  • M. Victoria Nugnes
  • Sonia Balyan

Announcement for 2025 winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Awards”

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 the University 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 the California 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.

Congratulations Tiago and Kimberly!

Many thanks to the ISB members for voting!

ISB Award subcommittee:

  • Susan Bello
  • M. Victoria Nugnes
  • Sonia Balyan

Voting for 2025 Biocuration Career Awards Open

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.

Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award 2025

Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award 2025

Nominees for Exceptional Contributions to Biocuration – Lifetime Achievement Award 2025

Nominations Open for 2025 Biocuration Awards

Nomination deadline extended until June 13

The ISB is calling for nominations for three Excellence in Biocuration awards in 2025 through the end of May:

1. Early Career Award (https://forms.gle/pGABYnqSqPgiDsVe9)

2. Advanced Career Award (https://forms.gle/Tyfa25BcrM8ejDsC9)

3. Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration (i.e., lifetime award; https://forms.gle/3E2b85eSteaoXzSA6)

Self nominations are welcome! See previous awards on our site: https://www.biocuration.org/community/biocuration-career-awards.

Announcement for winners of “Excellence in Biocuration Awards 2024”

The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) would like to congratulate the recipients of the 2024 Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career awards:

  • Early – Maria Victoria Nugnes from the University of Padova
  • Advanced – Sushma Naithani from Oregon State University

Thank you to the Award Subcommittee:

Parul Gupta 

Sue Bello

Sara Chuguransky

Thank you to all the ISB members who participated in the voting.