Dennis Benson

Dennis Benson is Chief of the Information Resources Branch at the National Center for Biotechnology, National Library of Medicine. Dr. Benson received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the neuroscience program at the University of Florida. Prior to his current position, Dr. Benson was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where his research focused on the neurophysiology of the auditory cortex. He came to the Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications at the NLM in 1980 and worked on knowledge-based retrieval systems in the area of hepatitis and toxicology. He developed a test bed for evaluating statistical-based text retrieval algorithms, which evolved into an operational text retrieval system known as IRX. Early applications of IRX included the McKusick Mendelian Inheritance in Man database and a seminal integrated genetics data resource known as GenInfo. With the creation of the NCBI in 1988, he has had responsibility for designing and managing the computing and network infrastructure for research and public access to the information resources NCBI producesóin particular, the Gen Bank, Entrez, and PubMed databases.