David Lipman is the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Dr. Lipman was appointed as NCBI’s first Director in 1989 and has overseen its growth into one of the most heavily used resources in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information, with over three million users each day.

He is one of the developers of the original BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) algorithm for rapidly identifying biological sequences that are similar to a queried sequence.

Dr. Lipman is the recipient of numerous awards and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts .