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 grateful for this prize, grateful to everyone at the Alpert Foundation and at Harvard Medical School. “Prizes like this are truly an honor, but still, the ultimate motivation for this work is the pleasure of discovery.
- Victor Nussenzweig

Victor Nussenzweig | 2015 Recipient

For their pioneering discoveries in chemistry and parasitology, and personal commitments to translate these into effective chemotherapeutic and vaccine-based approaches to control malaria - their collective work will impact millions of lives globally particularly in the developing countries.

Victor Nussenzweig obtained his  MD in 1953 and PhD in 1957 from the the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1964 he came to the USA and progressed from assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine (1965) to Hermann M. Biggs Professor of Pathology (1987). Among his many honors, he received the Life Time Achievement Award in malaria research from the BioMalPar European Organization; was elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2003); elected member of the American American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002); was the recipient of Bristol Myers Squib "Freedom to Discover" Award for distinguished achievement in Infectious Diseases (2006).

 View Past Recipients