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 world's largest DNA sequence database, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Dr. Lipman received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and his M.D. in 1980 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program and a widely respected figure in Bioinformatics. He also 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. Lipman has an Erdős number of 3. He received the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities Award for outstanding contributions to Biomolecular Technologies in 1996. He was awarded the Senior Scientist Accomplishment award from the International Society for Computational Biology in 2004.

Dr. Lipman 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.

Dr. Lipman was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

[edit] Sources and further reading

• ISCB ISCB Names 2004 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award Winner, Dr. David Lipman
• biomedcentral.com biomedcentral.com Interview with David Lipman
• ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Dr. David Lipman homepage
• bio-itworld.com Searching for Answers: NCBI’s David Lipman By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service