John Wilbur M.D., Ph.D.

Member, Board of External Advisors of CHIBI

Senior Investigator, NCBI, NLM, NIH, Computational Biology Branch

John Wilbur is a Senior Scientist in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for
Biotechnology Information. He is a principal investigator leading a research group in the study
and development of statistical text processing algorithms. He obtained a PhD in pure mathematics
from the University of California at Davis and an MD from Loma Linda University. He
completed residency training in internal medicine at UCD-Sacramento and a fellowship in
computational biology at the NIADDK/NIH. He is board certified in internal medicine.

While both were fellows at the Mathematical Research Branch of NIADDK, Dr. Wilbur together
with Dr. Lipman developed the first rapid search technique for discovering similarities between
DNA sequences and sequence homologies between proteins. Upon completion of his fellowship
Dr. Wilbur practiced medicine for five years during which time he developed software to produce
discharge instructions for patients. Shortly after the founding of the National Center for
Biotechnology Information, he joined NCBI as a research scientist. While at NCBI he has
developed the algorithm that produces PubMed related documents and the algorithm that in
PubMed allows fuzzy phrase matching. He is the author of algorithms for phrase identification in
natural language text that are used in NCBI’s electronic textbook project and allow for easy
reference from MEDLINE documents to related textbook material. Most recently he is the author
of the spell checking algorithm which is applied to PubMed user’s queries.

Dr. Wilbur attended the University of California at Davis on a University Fellowship and is a full
member of Sigma Xi. He received the President’s Award and the Student Investigator of the Year
Award from Loma Linda University. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha. He is the author of
over one hundred papers in pure and applied mathematics. He was elected a fellow of the
American College of Medical Informatics in 2001.

E-mail: Wilbur@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov