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 very grateful to the Warren Alpert Foundation for recognizing my work, and I am honored to be in the company of the previous award winners.
- Robert Langer

Robert Langer | 2011 Recipient

In recognition of their application of bioengineering principles to fundamental improvements in human health.

Robert S. Langer Jr., ScD is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a faculty member of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He re¬ceived his Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his ScD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering. From 1974–1977 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow for cancer researcher Judah Folkman at the Children’s Hospital Boston and at Harvard Medical School.

Langer holds more than 800 granted or pending patents. He has also authored more than 1,130 scientific papers and has participated in the founding of multiple technology companies. He has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, the 10th Annual Heinz Award in the category of Technology, the Economy and Employment, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the Millennium Technology Prize in 2008, and the American Chemical Society Priestley Medal in 2012. At 43, Langer is the youngest person in history to be elected to all three American science academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.

Langer’s work is at the interface of biotechnology and materials science. Langer and the researchers in his lab focus on the study and development of polymers to deliver drugs––particularly genetically engineered proteins, DNA, and RNAi––continuously at controlled rates for prolonged periods of time.

 View Past Recipients