Researcher profile

David S Wishart

Dr. David Wishart (PhD Yale, 1991) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computing Science at the University of Alberta, which he joined in 1995. He also holds adjunct appointments in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. His wide-ranging research interests cover metabolomics, analytical, food, natural product and protein chemistry, plus molecular biology and neuroscience. He has developed a number of widely used techniques based on NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and liquid and gas chromatography to characterize the structures of small and large molecules and he has led the multi-university, multi-investigator “Human Metabolome Project” (HMP) to catalogue all known chemicals in human tissues and biofluids. Using a variety of analytical chemistry techniques along with text mining and machine learning, Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for > 250,000 metabolites in the human body and archived this information on a freely accessible web resource, the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). More recently, his efforts have used the same methods to characterize the chemical constituents in various foods (through a database called FooDB) and food-associated biomarkers. His lab has also been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help create other useful chemistry databases and software tools to facilitate the characterization and identification of metabolites, drugs, pesticides and natural products. Dr. Wishart has published 556 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. His papers have been cited over 124,000+ times.