Announcing the 2025 Warren Alpert Foundation Prize Awardees Learn more

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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The Alpert Award is wonderful prestigious international recognition of the work over several decades of my laboratory, including trainees and research staff, together with key contributions from my co-awardees. It is a great honour to be recognized for the bench to bedside science that we and colleagues have worked so hard to translate into new therapies for human metabolic disease.
- Daniel J. Drucker

Daniel J. Drucker | 2020 Recipient

Dr. Daniel J. Drucker is an Endocrinologist and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto. Dr. Drucker received training in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology from the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the Toronto General Hospital, University of Toronto and completed a research fellowship in Molecular Endocrinology (1984-87) at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Drucker established his own laboratory research program in 1987 in Toronto.

A pioneer in diabetes treatment, Dr. Drucker's work has provided important insights leading to the development of new drugs for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. Currently, his laboratory at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum focuses on understanding the molecular biology and physiology of glucagon-like peptides.

He is the recipient of the 2009 Clinical Investigator Award from The Endocrine Society,  2011 Oon International Award for Preventive Medicine, Cambridge University School of Medicine, 2014 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, American Diabetes Association, 2014 Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research, Manpei Suzuki Foundation, 2015 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 2015 Appointed Officer of the Order of Canada.

 View Past Recipients