RICHARD P. Lifton, president of The Rockefeller University since 2016, will become a member of the Harvard Corporation, effective July 1, succeeding Shirley Tilghman, president emerita of Princeton. The transition assures that the University’s senior governing board will continue to include as a member a higher-education leader with hands-on experience in the life sciences, which are of enormous importance to Harvard and Greater Boston, at a time of severe federal government challenges to scientific research funding generally and Harvard’s in particular.
Lifton leads Rockefeller’s laboratory of human genetics and genomics. According to the Harvard news announcement, his research led to the discovery of mutations in 20 genes that cause blood pressure to rise or fall to extremes by altering renal salt retention—work involved in both public health and therapeutic discoveries worldwide.
A graduate of Dartmouth, Lifton earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. He did his medical residency at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital; served on the Medical School faculty from 1986 to 1993; and then joined the Yale faculty, where he served as chair of the department of genetics at Yale Medical School. He was both a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a Sterling Professor (Yale’s equivalent of a Harvard University Professor, the schools’ premier appointment for faculty members whose work extends broadly across disciplines, with profound intellectual impact). He has also served on advisory boards to the Broad Institute (the MIT-Harvard genomics center) and Massachusetts General Hospital (another Harvard Medical School affiliate).
President Alan M. Garber and Corporation Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker hailed Lifton as “a person of deep integrity, extraordinary intellectual curiosity and creativity, exceptional incisiveness, and sound judgment,” in a statement in the news announcement. “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.”
Lifton said, “Harvard is a national treasure for its leadership in education, scholarship, and research. Its generation of new knowledge advances the betterment of humanity with global impact. I’m honored to join President Garber and the other distinguished members of the Corporation, and I look forward to working with them and other colleagues to ensure that Harvard sustains and enhances its exceptional contributions to society.”
Garber and Pritzker thanked Tilghman, who has played a major role in defining the University’s life-sciences strategy, for “having 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.” Her “continuing exemplary service,” they said, “sets a standard for us all.”
