Tag: career award

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

Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards

The nominees for this year’s are in! Congratulations to all the nominees.

Voting will be open from June 1 – June 12. Only active members are eligible to vote. If you have not renewed your membership, please do so before June 1st. 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 nominees for the Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award are:

  • Pascal Carme, University of Cambridge
  • Kathiyayini Jayaraman, Kriyadocs, Olympia Cyberspace, Guindy, Chennai, India
  • Nancy Ontiveros-Palacios, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

Detailed descriptions here

The nominees for the Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award are:

  • Shailesh Kumar, BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India
  • Antonina Andreeva, EMBL-EBI, UK
  • Steven Marygold, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Bastian Fromm, The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
  • Sabrina Toro, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
  • Parul Gupta, Oregon State University, USA
  • Scott V Nguyen, American Type Culture Collection, USA

Detailed descriptions here

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.

ISB AGM Recording

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.

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.

Eleanor Williams on winning the Biocuration Award 2018

mouse dissociated embryonic kidney cells reforming into a kidney organoid
Mouse dissociated embryonic kidney cells reforming into a kidney organoid – from the Image Data Resource

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.