Dr. David Lipman is currently the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which is a division of the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health . NCBI was created by Congress in 1988 to do basic research in computational biology, and to develop computational tools, databases and information systems for molecular biology.

After medical training, Dr. Lipman joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) as a Research Fellow. In his research on computational tools, he developed the most widely used methods for searching biological sequence databases. There are thousands of citations to Dr. Lipman’s methods in papers which have used them to discover biological functions for unknown sequences and which have thereby advanced the understanding of the molecular basis of human disease.

Since 1989, Dr. Lipman has been the Director of the NCBI, a leading research center in computational biology, the creators of PubMed, and one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information.