David Lipman, M.D.

Dr. David Lipman is currently the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which is a division of the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health. NCBI was created by Congress in 1988 to do basic research in computational biology, and to develop computational tools, databases and information systems for molecular biology.

After medical training, Dr. Lipman joined the Mathematical Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) as a Research Fellow. In his research on computational tools, he developed the most widely used methods for searching biological sequence databases. There are thousands of citations to Dr. Lipman’s methods in papers which have used them to discover biological functions for unknown sequences and which have thereby advanced the understanding of the molecular basis of human disease.

Since 1989, Dr. Lipman has been the Director of the NCBI, a leading research center in computational biology, the creators of PubMed, and one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information.

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Chi Van Dang, M.D., Ph.D.

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Chi Dang is Vice Dean for Research of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and oversees the Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. He is a Professor of Medicine, Pathology, Oncology, and Cell Biology with joint appointment in Molecular Biology and Genetics. He received his B.S. (chemistry, highest honors) from the University of Michigan in 1975, his medical degree from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1982, holds a Ph.D. in chemistry/biochemistry (1978) from Georgetown University and is board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. He and his wife, Mary (Seeley) Dang enjoys their children, Eric and Vanessa.

Dr. Dang is Senior Editor of Cancer Research and serves on editorial boards of Current Cancer Therapy Reviews, Drug Discovery Today, Journal of Clinical Investigation , and Neoplasia . He is a member of the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors. He was elected to The Association of American Physicians and was president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (2003). He holds an NIH/NCI MERIT award and has sponsored eight NIH K08 physician-scientist awardees and mentored 12 Ph.D. doctorates and 26 post-doctoral fellows.

The Dang laboratory has contributed to the understanding of the function of the MYC cancer gene, which has emerged as a central switch in many different cancers. Dr. Dang defined the functional domains of the Myc transcription factor. His recent work focuses on the genetic program regulated by Myc, allowing this oncogenic transcription factor to elicit diverse cellular phenotypes. Through finding that Myc is able to activate the expression of genes involved in glycolysis, they connected the MYC cancer gene to an age-old observation of altered sugar metabolism in cancers. He has launched a public database on MYC ( www.myc-cancer-gene.org ) funded by the National Library of Medicine. This website provides a model for the much needed integration of vast amounts of molecular biological and genetic information on key molecules and pathways that are relevant to human diseases.