 in 1980 from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Lipman was a director of National Center for Biotechnology Information at National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.This center included groups led by Stephen Altschul (another BLAST co-author), David Landsman, Eugene Koonin (a prolific author on comparative genomics), and L. Aravind.He is most well known for his work on a series of sequence similarity algorithm, starting from the Wilbur-Lipman algorithm in 1983, FASTA search search in 1985, BLAST in 1990, and Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST in 1997.