Richard P. Lifton

Richard Priestley Lifton is an American biochemist who has been serving as the 11th and current president of Rockefeller University since September 2016.

Education and career

He earned his B.A. in biological sciences in 1975 from Dartmouth College. He got his M.D. in 1982 and Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1986, both from Stanford University. He trained at Brigham and Women's Hospital before starting his lab at Yale in 1993. He has been awarded the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences for his discovery of genes that are associated with the regulation of blood pressure. In 2014 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1994. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In May 2016, Lifton was named the president of Rockefeller University. He succeeded Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who left to assume the presidency of Stanford University, Lifton's alma mater.