Richard Lifton has served as President and Head of the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics of The Rockefeller University since 2016. His laboratory pioneered the study of rare forms of common disease to understand mechanisms of diseases such as hypertension, for which he showed that mutations that cause extremely high or low blood pressure repectively cause increased or decreased reabsorption of salt by the kidney. These findings have informed public health efforts to prevent and treat hypertension, preventing heart attacks and strokes. He also developed and implemented exome sequencing for clinical diagnosis and disease gene discovery, leading one of the NIH Centers for Mendelian Genomics, which has resulted in discovery of more than 1,500 new disease genes, and demonstrated the frequent occurrence of de novo mutations in many congenital disorders including autism and congenital heart disease. Lifton graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University and completed training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Prior to Rockefeller, he was Sterling Professor, chair of Genetics, and founder of the Yale Center for Genome Analysis at Yale University. He is a member and had served on the council fo the Association of American Physicians. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and has served on the governing councils of both. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Whitehead Institute, the Broad Institute, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Brotman Baty Institute for Genomics, the Simons Foundation for Autism Research, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco. He is a Director of Roche and its subsidiary Genentech, and served on the Advisory Council to the NIH Director. He served as co-chair of the NAS/Royal Society International Commission on the Clinical Use of Germline Genome Editing, and was co-chair of the White House/NIH Precision Medicine Planning Group. He received the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2008 Wiley Prize, and the highest scientific awards of the American Heart Association, the American Society of Nephrology, the Council for High Blood Pressure Research, the International Society for Nephrology and the International Society for Hypertension. He has received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Yale University.