Dr. David Lipman is the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a major R&D division of the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was appointed as NCBI’s first Director in 1989, shortly after Congress created the Center in 1988, 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 almost 3 million users each day. NCBI has a leadership role in conducting basic research in computational molecular biology and in storing, annotating and making accessible biomedical information and genetic data emanating from research conducted at NIH and laboratories around the world. Among NCBI's approximately 100 databases are GenBank (DNA sequences), PubMed (abstracts and citations of published biomedical literature), PubMed Central (full text of biomedical research articles) and dbGaP (Genome-Wide Association Studies and other phenotype and genotype data). A native of Rochester, New York, Dr. Lipman obtained a B.A. in Biology from Brown University in 1976 and an M.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. After medical training, Dr. Lipman joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at NIH as a Research Fellow, studying molecular evolution and developing computational tools for sequence comparison. Dr. Lipman 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, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American College of Medical Informatics.