David Lipman, MD

David Lipman serves as the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Library of Medicine, at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Lipman received his BA from Brown University and his MD from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Following the completion of his internal medicine internship at the University of Arizona at Tucson, Dr. Lipman joined the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH, as a Medical Staff Fellow in the Mathematical Research Branch. He has served as a member of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps since 1984. Comparative studies are a powerful tool used by computational biologists to detect important nucleotide or protein fragments that may be hidden in a raw sequence, to identify novel genes and proteins and to gain insight into the structure and function of a protein. Dr. Lipman's research efforts have made a significant contribution toward advancing this field of study, beginning with the first algorithm for rapid database searching, which was used for the critical discovery that the viral oncogene v-sis and a platelet-derived growth factor are derived from closely related cellular genes. Dr. Lipman's ongoing research includes the development of the most widely used tools for sequence database searching, including FASTA and BLAST. Dr. Lipman has also been instrumental in an effort to design and implement a platform for integrating the diverse data stored in the public databases. The NCBI Entrez Data Retrieval System was designed to allow users to search vast quantities of data with a technique that is both fast and sensitive yet easy to use. The ability to traverse both the literature and molecular databases via Entrez provides a very powerful method for accessing and analyzing data. Dr. Lipman has received many honors and awards for his achievements and contributions to the field of computational biology, including his recent election the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine. Additional honors and awards include his recent appointment as a member of the Association of American Physicians, the Public Health Service Outstanding Service Medal, and the Public Health Service Meritorious Service Medal.