Conference Agenda

July 15–17, 2026  |  Washington Hilton, Washington D.C.


Day 1 — Wednesday, July 15th

Time Location Event Speaker Presentation
8:30 – 8:45 AM Monroe Opening Remarks Asiyah Lin
8:45 – 9:30 AM Monroe Invited Talk Birgit Meldal (Virtual) Curation of early research data: when humans and machines partner we create value and retain trust
9:30 – 10:00 AM Monroe Journal Track Jose Alejandro Salazar Castro (Virtual) OnTEPT: A multimodal OWL ontology for post-traumatic stress disorder
10:00 – 11:00 AM Columbia Ballroom First Recess Posters and Demos
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Monroe Keynote Speaker Richard Scheuermann Toward a complete lexicon of cell types in the biomedical literature
12:00 – 12:20 PM Monroe Conference Paper Landon Todd Detwiler Investigating the use of an ontology for grounding LLMs: Using GraphRAG with the Foundational Model of Anatomy
12:20 – 12:40 PM Monroe Conference Paper James Balhoff Frontier LLM-based agents can overcome the ontology curation bottleneck for natural phenotypes
12:40 – 1:00 PM Monroe Conference Paper David Osumi-Sutherland Evidencell - an agentic research assistant for the Cell Ontology
1:00 – 2:20 PM On Own Lunch Break
2:20 – 3:05 PM Monroe Invited Talk Maria Shatz Environmental Health Language Collaborative: Data standards and ontologies for Exposomics
3:05 – 3:25 PM Monroe Conference Talk Christian Kindermann Consistent but Incorrect: Detecting Discrepancies in Ontologies
3:25 – 3:45 PM Monroe Conference Talk Regina Hurley (Virtual) The Injury Ontology
3:45 – 4:00 PM Monroe Conference Talk Karamarie Fecho (Virtual) The ROBOKOP Biomedical Knowledge Graph System: Leveraging Ontologies for Data Normalization, Integration, and Query
4:00 – 4:40 PM Columbia Ballroom Second Recess Posters and Demos
4:40 – 5:10 PM Monroe Industry Talk Larry Callahan Autopoiesis AI and Development of a Global Substance Knowledge System (GSKS)
5:10 – 5:40 PM Monroe Journal Track Cui Tao ACCELERATE-BASSO: Advancing Behavioral and Social Science Research through Ontology Best Practices
5:40 – 6:30 PM Monroe Invited Talk Raja Cholan (Virtual) The Evolution of Health Data Standards and Terminologies at the National Library of Medicine and Potential Implications for the AI Era
7:00 – 9:00 PM ICBO Dinner / Social Event Location TBD

Day 2 — Thursday, July 16th

Time Location Event Speaker Presentation
8:20 – 8:30 AM Monroe Opening Remarks Anna Maria Masci
8:30 – 9:15 AM Monroe Invited Talk Lynn Schriml Disease data standardization landscape: role of ontologies, NER and AI in biocuration
9:15 – 10:00 AM Monroe Invited Talk Reed Shabman Towards an AI-Ready Data Ecosystem: How Ontologies Support Metadata Findability and Interoperability in the NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal
10:00 – 11:00 AM Columbia Ballroom First Recess Posters and Demos
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Monroe ICBO Special Event: Panel Discussion Panelist: Michel Dumontier, Robert Hoehndorf, James Ballhoff The Future of Bioontology: Challenges, Agentic AI, and Next-Generation Training
12:00 – 12:15 PM Monroe ICBO Special invited guest talk Samir Lababidi Precision FDA and AI
12:15 – 12:45 PM Monroe ICBO Special Event: Community Engagement Anna Maria Masci/Asiyah Yu Lin The Future of Our Community
12:45 – 1:00 PM Monroe Concluding Remarks / Feedback Session Anna Maria Masci
1:00 – 2:20 PM On Own Lunch Break
2:20 – 6:00 PM Lincoln West VDOS Workshop
7:00 – 9:00 PM Organizer's Event

Day 3 — Friday, July 17th

Time Location Event
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Monroe Cell Workshop