W. John Wilbur, MD

John Wilbur is a Senior Scientist in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He is a principal investigator leading a research group in the study and development of statistical text processing algorithms. He obtained a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of California at Davis and an MD from Loma Linda University. He completed residency training in internal medicine at UCD-Sacramento and a fellowship in computational biology at the National Institute National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health. He is board certified in internal medicine. While both were fellows at the Mathematical Research Branch of NIADDK, Dr. Wilbur and Dr. Lipman developed the first rapid search technique for discovering similarities between DNA sequences and sequence homologies between proteins. On completion of his fellowship, Dr. Wilbur practiced medicine for five years, during which time he developed software to produce discharge instructions for patients. Shortly after the founding of NCBI, he joined NCBI as a research scientist. While at NCBI, Dr. Wilbur has developed the algorithm that produces PubMed related documents and the algorithm that in PubMed allows fuzzy phrase matching. Most recently, he is the author of algorithms for phrase identification in natural language text that are used in NCBI's electronic textbook project and allow for easy reference from medline documents to related textbook material. Dr. Wilbur attended the University of California at Davis on a University Fellowship and is a full member of Sigma Xi. He received the President's Award and the Student Investigator of the Year Award from Loma Linda University. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha. He is also the author of more than 50 papers in pure and applied mathematics.