Richard Lifton

Richard Lifton, a physician-scientist, became the eleventh president of The Rockefeller University in 2016. Dr. Lifton has pioneered the use of genetics and genomics to understand fundamental mechanisms underlying cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, kidney disease, cancer, and congenital disorders. He is best known for discovering the genes that underlie hypertension, a leading cause of death. His work established that increased renal salt reabsorption is the leading cause of hypertension, informing public health strategies to prevent and treat this disease.Dr. Lifton also made the first clinical diagnosis using exome sequencing and optimized the method for rapidly and inexpensively sequencing the protein-coding portions of the genome. He has led the application of this transformative technology for the discovery of new disease genes and for clinical diagnosis.An alumnus of Dartmouth College, Dr. Lifton holds M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He completed a medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before becoming an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical Schoo1 in 1991. Dr. Lifton joined Yale University in 1993 as an assistant professor of internal medicine and genetics. He was appointed a professor at Yale in 1997 and the Sterling Professor of Genetics in 2002. From 1998 to 2016, Dr. Lifton chaired Yale’s department of genetics. He also served as executive director of the Yale Center for Genome Analysis, which he founded in 2009. In addition, from 1994 until his move to Rockefeller, Dr. Lifton was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Today, at Rockefeller, he heads the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics.Dr. Lifton has received a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and a Wiley Prize, and he has been named the recipient of the 2023 George M. Kober Medal from the Association of American Physicians. He has also received the highest scientific honors of the American Heart Association, the American and International Societies of Nephrology, the American and International Societies of Hypertension, and the Endocrine Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. Recently, he co-chaired the International Commission on Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing, sponsored by the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine and the U.K. Royal Society.In addition to his university responsibilities, Dr. Lifton serves on the advisory boards of several nonprofit scientific and medical organizations, including the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. He is also a member of the boards of directors of Genentech and Roche.