Speaker bio: Dr. Richard P. Lifton is the 11th President of The Rockefeller University, where he is also Carson Family Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics. He has pioneered the use of genetics and genomics to understand fundamental mechanisms underlying human diseases. He is well-known for his discovery that mutations with large effect on human blood pressure act by altering renal salt reabsorption, discoveries that have informed public health efforts and therapeutic strategies used worldwide to prevent heart attacks and strokes, and for his development of exome sequencing for clinical diagnosis and disease gene discovery. Dr. Lifton graduated from Dartmouth College, obtained M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University and completed training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Prior to Rockefeller, he was chair of the Department of Genetics and Sterling Professor at Yale University, where he founded the Yale Center for Genome Analysis. 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 organizations. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Simons Foundation for Autism Research, and has previously served on the Advisory Council to the NIH Director, the Scientific Advisory Boards of the Whitehead Institute and the Broad Institute. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Roche and its subsidiary Genentech. He has received numerous awards for his research, including 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.