Additionally, Wishart holds a joint appointment in metabolomics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

[12] Wishart started his academic career as an assistant professor in 1995 with the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Alberta where he held the Bristol Myers Squibb Chair in Biotechnology for 10 years.

Because of his growing involvement in clinical chemistry, Wishart was appointed as an adjunct professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology in 2012.

A common theme to his research career has been the development of techniques, technology cores, protocols, data resources or computer programs that make science simpler, faster, cheaper or easier.

[14][15] Subsequently, Wishart showed how NMR chemical shifts could be used to easily and rapidly measure protein flexibility via the random coil index or RCI.

[18] Wishart also determined how chemical shifts could be used to measure residue accessible surface area,[19] and to identify super secondary structure elements.

[19][20] To further extend this work, Wishart developed innovative methods to determine the 3D structure of proteins using a technique called chemical shift threading with programs such as GeNMR, CS23D and E-Thrifty.

In 2001 he developed and then patented NMR-based techniques (leading to the spin-off company Chenomx[5]) that permitted the rapid identification and quantification of metabolites by NMR in biofluids.

Wishart raised over $10 million in funding from Genome Canada and launched a multi-institutional, pan-Canadian program to systematically identify all metabolites, drugs and xenobiotics in clinically important human biofluids.

Using this wide array of equipment, Wishart helped develop a number of quantitative metabolomics techniques for NMR [36][37] and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.

[38][39]  Using these methods, Wishart and his team have conducted comprehensive, quantitative metabolome analyses of human serum,[40] urine,[41] saliva,[42] cerebrospinal fluid [43] and feces.

So far, this initiative has led Wishart's lab to develop and release more than 100 publicly accessible web servers and web-based databases,[45] including NP-MRD[46] and CFM-ID.