Celebrating the Transformative Impact of Computer Tools and Databases in Biomedicine

Each year the recipient(s) of the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize are recognized at a scientific symposium hosted by Harvard Medical School.

2023 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize Symposium

In honor of: David J. Lipman MD Senior Science Advisor for Bioinformatics and Genomics Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, U.S. Food and Drug Administration for his vision and generation of computational tools, databases and infrastructure that changed the way biological information can be rapidly and freely exchanged, searched, and analyzed, thus enabling discovery of fundamental biological mechanisms, their alterations in disease, and potential as new therapeutic targets.

David Lipman

David Lipman | 2023 Recipient

Dr. David Lipman worked at the National Institutes of Health for 36 years and served as the founding Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine/NIH. Under Dr. Lipman’s leadership, NCBI created and managed some of the most heavily used biomedical information resources including PubMed, PubMed Central, GenBank, SRA, and RefSeq. In 2014, Dr. Lipman also led the team at NCBI that developed the computational genomics resources used by the FDA and CDC to identify foodborne outbreaks more rapidly and to determine the source of contamination. He is currently Senior Science Advisor in Bioinformatics and Genomics at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

From 2017 through 2019, Dr. Lipman served as Chief Science Officer for plant-based meat company Impossible Foods. He directed the team that developed and commercialized the current Impossible Burger, the Impossible Whopper, and the sausage and ground pork formulations.

Dr. Lipman’s research has focused on molecular evolution, molecular epidemiology, comparative genomics, and the development of computational tools including the computational tool, BLAST, for biological sequence comparison and database search. His research papers have been cited by over 250,000 scientific publications. Dr. Lipman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Symposium Program

Each year the recipient(s) of the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize are recognized at a scientific symposium hosted by Harvard Medical School.

Watch the full program

Opening Remarks

George Q. Daley, MD,

Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Harvard University; Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine

Vamsi Mootha, MD

Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Award Lecture

David J. Lipman, MD

Invited Speakers

Eugene V. Koonin, PhD

Distinguished Investigator, Evolutionary Genomics Group Leader; National Institutes of Health

Debora Marks, PhD

Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School; Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

David C. Page, MD

Member, Whitehead Institute; Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Olga Troyanskaya, PhD

Director, Princeton Precision Health; Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University; Deputy Director for Genomics, Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology

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Past Symposia

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I am extremely honored to receive the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize. I am very happy that our discovery of PD-1 and our subsequent 10-year basic research on PD-1 led to its clinical application as a novel cancer immunotherapy. I hope this development will encourage many scientists working in the basic bio-medical field.
- Tasuku Honjo

Tasuku Honjo | 2017 Recipient

Dr. Tasuku Honjo is Professor of Department of Immunology and Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University, and also Chairman of Board of Directors, Shizuoka Prefectural University Corporation. Dr. Honjo is well known for his discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation. He has established the basic conceptual framework of class switch recombination starting from discovery of DNA deletion (1978) and S regions (1980), followed by elucidation of the whole mouse immunoglobulin heavy-chain locus. Aside from class switching recombination, he discovered PD-1 (program cell death 1), a negative coreceptor at the effector phase of immune response and showed that PD-1 modulation contributes to treatments of viral infection, tumor and autoimmunity. Cancer immunotherapy with PD-1 blockade has been approved for many types of cancer and revolutionalized the concept of cancer treatment. For these contributions, Dr. Honjo has received many awards, including Imperial Prize (1996), Japan Academy Prize (1996), Robert Koch Prize (2012), Order of Culture (2013), Tang Prize (2014), William B. Coley Award (2014), Richard V. Smalley, MD Memorial Award (2015), Kyoto Prize (2016), The Keio Medical Science Prize (2016) and Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award in Biomedicine (2016). Honored by the Japanese Government as a person of cultural merits (2000). Elected as a foreign associate of National Academy of Sciences, USA in 2001, as a member of Leopoldina, the German Academy of Natural Scientists in 2003, and also as a member of Japan Academy in 2005.

 View Past Recipients