Thanks to all who attended this year’s Annual General Meeting. Congratulations again to our Early and Advance Career Award Winners, Tiago Lubiana and Kimberly Van Auken! You can find their excellent talks at around the half way point of the recording of the meeting.
The meeting recording is up on the ISB YouTube channel if you missed the meeting.
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
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
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:
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
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.
In mid-January, I got an email saying I had won the 2018 Biocuration Career Award from the International Society for Biocuration! I was excited to win the award, thrilled to be going to the Biocuration conference in China and wondered what I would say in a presentation about “my career” at the conference.
That week I had just started in a new biocuration position and after hearing about the award, my new colleagues suggested I give a lunchtime talk on my scientific background so that the others in the team could get to know me better. As I worked on a timeline and slides about each of my past biocuration positions, I realized that there actually was a lot that I wanted to say.
I have worked on several different projects over the last 17 years that I would describe as “biocuration.” These jobs have varied greatly. I started curating data in a research position at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, collating information about mouse and human olfactory receptors. Then back in the UK I worked in a more “service” role in the established resources of ArrayExpress and Expression Atlas at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), curating data submissions, talking with submitters and I started to delve into the world of ontologies. More recently I have been the primary curator setting up the metadata processing pipeline for the Image Data Resource at the University of Dundee. This resource was built from scratch, and went where few others have dared to go, creating a robust data repository for complex bioimaging data, with the added value of metadata integration. It has been immensely satisfying to see this project grow both in size and reputation.
Now, after spending a lifetime in academia, I am off on a new adventure working as a Scientific Curator for a company, Genomics England, set up to to provide a genomic medicine service for the UK National Health Service using data from the 100,000 Genomes Project.
My biocuration career has been partly driven by the external forces i.e. what fits with family life and funding opportunities, and partly by my own interests and desire to develop skills. In hindsight each job seems a logical progression from the last, with new experiences, new skills, new technologies (github and conference calling were not around in the early 2000s) and new challenges that have made for a fun and interesting career.
I am very proud to receive the International Society of Biocuration Career Award. It has helped me reflect on my work and recognize that I have had a career and not just a series of jobs! I hope that by sharing my story and the skills I have found to be most useful, I can help others think about their own journeys. It is also wonderful to appreciate the international community of biocurators who meet together to share experiences and recognize the importance of data and biocuration in the sciences. I am looking forward to meeting many of you in Shanghai!
Dr Eleanor Williams will be presenting her work at the International Biocuration Conference in Shanghai in April 2018, her talk will be on:
Title: Curating bioimaging data – lessons from the first 40 terabytes
Synopsis: I have experienced three very different types of biocuration work in my career. My first taste of biocuration was in a research lab curating information about olfactory receptor genes. I then moved to work on the well-established functional genomics databases of ArrayExpress and the Expression Atlas at EMBL-EBI curating data submissions submissions. From there I moved to a project at the University of Dundee setting up the Image Data Resource for bioimaging data. This was my biggest curation challenge, starting almost from scratch to develop a method to capture the biomolecular, experimental and analytic annotations associated with images, and to create a pipeline to populate the database. I will describe the most useful biocuration skills I have learnt and some of the challenges I’ve encountered. I will finish by describing my new position, working as a scientific curator in a company performing analyses of the genomes of patients with rare diseases.
The Biocuration Career Award recognizes biocurators in non-leadership positions who have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration.
The nominations will be reviewed by the newly formed ISB Award Committee, comprised of one member of the ISB’s Executive Committee (ISB-EC) and six (6) additional members from the wider research community; these members were nominated by the ISB-EC based on diversity in area of expertise, organization type, role, and geographic location.
Who can nominate and/or be nominated?
How to submit your nomination:
The recipient of the award will be invited to give a presentation at the following International Biocuration Conference, with all expenses paid by the ISB.
Deadline to submit nominations: Sunday 20-March-2016
Award Announcement: April, 2016 at the 9th International Biocuration Conference
Sincerely,
The 2016 ISB Award Committee.
The 2016 “Biocuration Career” Award Committee are:
Melissa Haendel (Chair)
Emma Ganley
Takashi Gojobori
David Landsman
Michele Magrane
Kimberly Van Auken
Alfonso Valencia
