Travel Grant Awardees – 16th Annual International Biocuration Conference
The ISB are pleased to award fellowships to the following six members to attend the forthcoming ISB conference. These grants help cover travel expenses associated with attending the conference e.g. accommodation, flights and ground transportation.
Congratulations to you all!
 Yukie Akune is a postdoctoral bioinformatician in the Glycosciences Laboratory at Imperial College, London, UK directed by Professor Ten Feizi and Dr Yan Liu. Dr Akune and her collaborators at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia have developed the Carbohydrate micro-Array Analysis and Reporting Tool (CarbArrayART), for storing, processing and presenting glycan array data, as well as data submission to the international GlyGen glycan microarray repository that has been developed with her input. She is committed to establishing data-mining systemsin the field of glycan recognition including definitions of parameters for curation and annotation of published glycan microarray dataon diverse glycan-recognition systems in health and disease. |
 Shasank Sekhar Swain (post-doctoral researcher, Regional Medical Center (ICMR), Bhubaneswar, India) introduced a novel ‘hybrid drug’ concept using chemical conjugationbetween phytochemicals and clinically inactive or obsolete drugs during his doctoral research work. Currently, he is working on developing a greater number of potential hybrid drug candidates against bacteria, mycobacteria, cancer, etc. As an early-career research scientist in bioinformatics, he uses widely available computer-aided drug discovery platforms and bioinformatics tools to select the most drug-able hybrid drugs prior to synthesis and clinical experiments in order to reduce the resources and costs associated with traditional hit-and-trial drug discovery methods. |
 Dominik Martinat is a PhD student at the Department of Physical Chemistry of Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. The focus of his study is an integration of biomedical databases. The main project he participates in is MolMeDB (Molecules On Membrane Database). |
 Anna Spackova, is a PhD student at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, Department of Physical Chemistry. Anna is also a bioinformatician and her research involves mainly tools connected to protein structure especially to protein tunnels, that link the surface with active sites of the protein. Her main focus is the the MOLEonline tool together with the ChannelsDB database. |
 Nishad Thalhath is a doctoral candidate in Information Science and a member of the Metadata Laboratory at the School of Library, Media and Information Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan.His research interests include metadata standards, knowledge graphs, and (meta)data interoperability. Before becoming a doctoral student, he worked as a developer, engineer and consultant in various IT and ITES projects. He currently works as a part-time researcher in the Laboratory for Large-Scale Biomedical Data Technology, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Japan, where he develops and manages the metadata and integration systems for omics data. |
 Karina Martinez, is a graduate student in the Bioinformatics and Molecular Biochemistry MS program at The George Washington University in Washington, DC and is a member of the GlyGen data management team. She is working on curating glycan expression levels in the presence and absence of disease from the literature. She expects this effort to result in a set of publicly available datasets designed for bioinformatic and machine learning applications. She is also working in the biomarker curation space to create a comprehensive dataset of glycan biomarkers which will present new opportunities for data mining. |
