James Ostell, PhD

James Ostell has been Chief of the Information Engineering Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information since NCBI was created within the National Library of Medicine in 1988. He received his BS and MS degrees in zoology from the University of Massachusetts. His earned his PhD in cellular and developmental biology from Harvard University. Prior to coming to NCBI, Dr. Ostell was the author of a successful commercial software package for molecular biologists, now called MacVector, which is still on the market today. Moving to the public sector, Dr. Ostell came to NCBI on its founding. As Chief of the Information Engineering Branch, Dr. Ostell has been responsible for all major production resources at NCBI. These resources include such familiar names as GenBank, Entrez, PubMed, BLAST, RefSeq, and many others. Dr. Ostell has taken many roles in the different projects, from original designer in some to top level manager in others, and everything between. He has had to balance the freedom of the many talented and creative people behind each of these projects with the institutional needs for stability, standardization, and unification of effort, while attempting to respond to the rapidly changing science, politics, and user needs of the last decade. The growth of NCBI public resources from zero to more than two million unique users a month in ten years is the measure of his success in this endeavor. Dr. Ostell is a member of the Senior Biomedical Research Service at NIH. He has received the NIH Award of Merit, the NLM Director's Honor Award, and the "Hammer" Award for Reinventing Government.