Richard Lifton, M.D., Ph.D., is president of the Rockefeller University. He was previously the chair and Sterling Professor of Genetics at Yale and executive director of the Yale Center for Human Genetics and Genomics.

A physician-scientist, Lifton has pioneered the use of genetics and genomics to understand human disease biology, focusing particularly on mechanisms underlying hypertension and cardiovascular disease, neoplasia, kidney disease and osteoporosis. Lifton’s laboratory developed whole-exome sequencing technology that revolutionized the genomics field, and has gone on to use this technology to identify several hundred human disease risk mutations and to make the first clinical diagnosis by genome-level sequencing.

Lifton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In recognition of his distinguished career, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2014. Lifton also served on President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015 and was awarded the Academy Medal for Distinguished Contributions in Biomedical Science from the New York Academy of Medicine in 2016.