12th Annual Earl P. Benditt Lectureship

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 5:00 PM

Health Sciences Center

Turner Auditorium, Room D-209

 

Richard P. Lifton, M.D., Ph.D.

Chairman, Department of Genetics

Sterling Professor of Genetics, Medicine and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry

Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Yale University

Insights Into Vascular Diseases and Their Treatments from Human Genetics

 

Rick Lifton is Chairman of the Department of Genetics, Sterling Professor of Genetics and Internal Medicine, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale University. He received his BA from Dartmouth, MD and PhD degrees from Stanford, and completed clinical training in Medicine at Harvard prior to moving to Yale in 1993.

Dr. Lifton's laboratory has used human genetics and genomics to identify causes of heart, kidney, and bone disease. By investigating thousands of families from around the world, his group has identified more than 25 human disease genes. These include key genes and pathways that are critical to the risk of hypertension, stroke, heart attack, and osteoporosis. These studies have provided new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to these diseases, which affect more than 1 billion people world-wide.

Dr. Lifton also Chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of Merck, the Medical Physiology Section of the National Academy of Sciences, and the NIH Advisory Committee for Large Scale Genomic Sequencing. He serves on the Governing Councils of the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians, and on the Scientific Advisory Boards of The Simons Foundation Autism Project, The Gallo Foundation of the University of California, San Francisco, and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

His honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He has received the highest scientific awards of the American Heart Association, the International Society of Hypertension and the International Society of Nephrology, and is recipient of the 2008 Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences.