Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
We write with the excellent news that Richard Lifton, president of The Rockefeller University and an eminent life scientist and educator, will join the Corporation as of July 1, 2025.
He will succeed Shirley Tilghman, president emerita of Princeton University, who has brought to the Corporation an extraordinary combination of university leadership experience, academic stature and scientific accomplishment, engagement with a wide array of other institutions, and constant devotion to higher education’s highest ideals.
Rick Lifton has ably led The Rockefeller University, one of the nation’s premier centers of biomedical science and graduate education, since 2016. He has worked to strengthen programs, build the faculty, generate new resources, and oversee a major campus expansion, all while continuing to head Rockefeller’s laboratory on human genetics and genomics. Previously, he was a leading member of the Yale faculty for more than twenty years, rising to become a Sterling Professor and serving as longtime chair of Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics, as director of two research centers, and as a member of Yale’s presidential search committee, among other roles.
Rick is no stranger to Harvard, having done his medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and then having served for seven years on the Harvard Medical School faculty before being recruited to Yale. He has maintained close ties with Harvard colleagues, including through service on scientific advisory boards for the Broad Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Over decades, he has been a prominent member of many boards, committees, and councils related to scientific discovery and science policy. Among other leadership roles, he has served on the governing council of the National Academies, the presidential search committee for the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and the advisory council for the National Institutes of Health director; he chaired the governance committee responsible for reorganization of the National Academies; he co-chaired the International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing; and he chaired the planning committee for the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative.
The author of hundreds of published papers, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator for more than twenty years, Rick has been recognized with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, as well as high honors from the American Heart Association, the American and International Societies of Nephrology, the American and International Societies of Hypertension, the Association of American Physicians, and the Endocrine Society. In addition, he has extensive experience at the nexus of academia and industry, through service on boards of directors and scientific advisory boards for various biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
Beyond his sterling resume, Rick is known to colleagues as a person of deep integrity, extraordinary intellectual curiosity and creativity, exceptional incisiveness, and sound judgment. He has dedicated his life’s work to the advancement of higher education and the progress and promise of science, embracing and embodying the pursuit of academic excellence.
We look forward to welcoming Rick Lifton to the Corporation this summer, as we navigate these consequential and challenging times for our own university and others. As we do, we want to extend our profound gratitude to Shirley Tilghman, whose continuing exemplary service to higher education and to Harvard sets a standard for us all.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber, President
Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow, Harvard Corporation
P.S. A related Harvard Gazette article appears here.
