Recognizing outstanding global contributions to bioinformatics

Celebrating excellence: meet the 2025 SIB Bioinformatics Awards laureates

Two early career bioinformaticians have been recognized for their mathematical and AI models, along with a collaborative resource for single-cell data analyses. The three 2025 SIB Bioinformatics Awards laureates presented their work to over 500 international scientists at this year’s [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Conference. The prestigious awards are open to researchers around the world and reflect SIB’s long-standing dedication to promoting excellence in bioinformatics.

Early Career Award

Identifying biochemical compounds with AI: Michael Skinnider

Several of the past winners of this award and their work have been very inspiring and important to me. It is an honour to be in the same company.

Michael Skinnider

Princeton University Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, USA

Michael Skinnider received the 2025 Early Career Award for his innovative application of computational biology and AI to an impressive range of biological questions and analyses, including the new area of metabolomics. Three notable career achievements include: 

  • developing software to find new microbial metabolites with food, agricultural and medical applications as an undergraduate student, which led to a successful spin-off company;
  • developing a generative AI during his PhD that can predict likely structures of new designer drugs, which has since been deployed in numerous forensic and law enforcement laboratories;
  • using the same approach to map mammalian metabolites, the vast majority of which remain unknown. In addition to addressing a fundamental gap in our understanding of living systems, this ‘biochemical language model’ will also help identify new disease biomarkers and therapeutic targets.

Read interview with Michael Skinnider

PhD Paper Award

Investigating aging with a model of random molecular damage: David Meyer

This public recognition is an important step towards my goal of setting up my own lab. 

David Meyer

University Hospital and University of Cologne, Germany

David Meyer received the 2025 PhD Paper Award for mathematical modelling published in Nature Aging, which provides strong evidence that aging is caused by random molecular damage rather than an evolved biological process. Titled ‘Aging clocks based on accumulating stochastic variation’ and published last year, the paper presents a novel approach to resolving a long-standing question – and has already been cited over 90 times. 

Read interview with David Meyer

The judges also gave honourable mentions in the PhD Paper Award category to:

Innovative Resource Award

A community infrastructure for single-cell ‘omics’ data: scverse

Many different skill sets were needed to make scverse a successful resource. Getting recognition and external validation for this, and all the work involved, feels very good.

Ilan Gold

Helmholtz Munich, Germany

scverse is a community-driven ecosystem of open-source computational tools for analysing single-cell genomics and other omics data – the new frontier of life-science research.  Uniting these under a common, open-source framework not only makes it easier for researchers to build, share, and apply the tools, but also ensures their long-term maintenance. The 2025 Innovative Resource Award was accepted by Ilan Gold, a member of the scverse core team.

Read interview with Illan Gold

A long-running, prestigious award

The biennial SIB Bioinformatics Awards have run since 2008 and are open to researchers around the world. The winners are chosen by an expert international jury and announced during the [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Conference – where they gain wide visibility within the bioinformatics community through a plenary talk.