 Before joining Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2011, he was the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was also the Horvitz Professor of Computer Science.From 1998–2005, he was the head of the Bioinformatics department at The Institute for Genomic Research, one of the world's largest genome sequencing centers, and prior to that he was a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University.In 2013, Salzberg won the Benjamin Franklin award in bioinformatics.