Introduction
David J. Lipman is an American biologist who since 1989 has been the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health. NCBI is the home of GenBank, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in bioinformatics.
Education
Dr. Lipman received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his M.D. in 1980 from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Career
Lipman leads an intramural research program, including groups led by Stephen Altschul (another BLAST co-author), David Landsman, Eugene Koonin (a prolific author on comparative genomics), and L. Aravind.
He is most well known for his work on a series of sequence similarity algorithm, starting from the Wilbur-Lipman algorithm in 1983, FASTA search search in 1985, BLAST in 1990, and Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST in 1997.
Lipman also works with Dennis A. Benson and others at NCBI, contributing to the maintenance and improvement of GenBank and annually publishes a paper on their progress. The improvements include specification of data format, curation of data, integration of protein information with DNA sequences and scientific literature.
He was one of the originators of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, a project to sequence and make available the genomes of thousands of influenza virus isolates.
He is also the Editor-in-Chief for an open access, peer-reviewed online journal Biology Direct.
Awards and honors
Dr. Lipman received the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies in 1996.
In 2004, he was awarded the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award from the International Society for Computational Biology.
In 2005, Dr. Lipman was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
In 2013, he received the award of a White House "Open Science" Champion of Change.