Life and health scientists

Richard D. Clover

Richard D. Clover (died 2017) was an American physician and public health leader who served as founding dean of the University of Louisville School of Public Health and Information Sciences.

Richard D. Gelber is a biostatistician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard professor who has led breast cancer, leukemia, and AIDS trials since 1977 and developed the Q-TWiST and STEPP methods.

Richard D. Klausner

Richard D. Klausner is an American cell biologist and physician who directed the National Cancer Institute from 1995 to 2001 and is a founder of Altos Labs.

Richard D. Kolodner

Richard D. Kolodner is an American molecular biologist at UC San Diego known for identifying the human mismatch repair genes MSH2 and MLH1, whose inherited defects cause Lynch syndrome.

Richard D. Palmiter

Richard D. Palmiter (born 1942) is an American biochemist and neuroscientist at the University of Washington, known for the 1982 transgenic "super mouse" and dopamine-deficient mice studies.

Richard D. Vierstra

Richard D. Vierstra is an American plant biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, known for his research on plant protein degradation and phytochrome light perception.

Richard D. Wood

Richard D. Wood is an American molecular biologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center known for rebuilding nucleotide excision repair, the process that removes UV damage from DNA.

Oct 10, 2026

Richard Darwin Keynes

Richard Darwin Keynes (1919–2010) was a British physiologist who showed with Alan Hodgkin in 1955 that potassium ions move through nerve membranes in single file.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (born 1941), British evolutionary biologist emeritus at Oxford, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype, and The God Delusion; defender of the gene's-eye view, coiner of 'evolvability', and antagonist of Gould and E.O. Wilson.

Richard Dixon (plant biochemist)

Richard A. Dixon is a plant biochemist, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007 and the Royal Society in 2018, known for lignin biosynthesis and metabolic engineering.

Richard Doll

Richard Doll (1912–2005) was a British physician and epidemiologist at Oxford who showed in 1950 that smoking causes lung cancer, and also established asbestos and radiation as cancer hazards.

Richard Durbin (geneticist)

Richard Durbin, born 1960, is a British computational genomics researcher, Al Kindi Professor of Genetics at Cambridge, who jointly led the 1000 Genomes Project and developed bwa.

Richard E. Champlin

Richard E. Champlin is an American hematologist and stem cell transplantation pioneer who chaired MD Anderson's Department of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy from 1998 to 2020.

Richard E. Dickerson

Richard E. Dickerson (1931–2025) was an American X-ray crystallographer who computed the myoglobin Fourier map in Kendrew's laboratory and solved the first single-crystal structure of B-DNA at Caltech in 1980.

Richard E. Green

Richard E. Green is a professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz who led sequencing the Neanderthal genome and founded the genomics company Dovetail Genomics.

Richard E. Kerber

Richard E. Kerber (1939–2016) was an American cardiologist at the University of Iowa for 45 years whose defibrillation research shaped the AHA's CPR guidelines and public access defibrillation.

Richard E. Kuntz

Richard E. Kuntz is an American interventional cardiologist known for large coronary stenting trials, who founded the Harvard Clinical Research Institute and spent 15 years at Medtronic.

Richard E. Lenski

Richard E. Lenski is an American evolutionary biologist and professor at Michigan State University, best known for the Long-Term Evolution Experiment, in which E. coli populations have evolved since 1988.

Richard E. Nisbett

Richard E. Nisbett is an American social psychologist at the University of Michigan known for research on cultural differences in reasoning and on teaching statistical reasoning.

Richard E. Pagano

Richard E. Pagano is a cell biologist known for using fluorescent lipid analogs to trace lipid movement in living cells, at the Carnegie Institution and later Mayo Clinic.

Richard Eastell

Richard Eastell, born 1953, is a British physician-scientist and Professor of Bone Metabolism at the University of Sheffield, known for osteoporosis research, bone turnover markers, and major drug trials.

Richard Easterlin

Richard Easterlin (1926–2024) was an American economist and demographer at the University of Southern California whose 1974 paper founded happiness economics and gave name to the Easterlin paradox.

Oct 10, 2026

Richard Ellis (pediatrician)

Richard White Bernard Ellis (1902–1966) was a British pediatrician and professor of child life and health at the University of Edinburgh, best known for co-describing Ellis–van Creveld syndrome in 1940.

Richard Erickson

Richard Erickson, known as Richie, is an American quantitative ecologist at the USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, who received a 2025 PECASE award.

Richard Evans Schultes

Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) was an American ethnobotanist at Harvard, considered the father of modern ethnobotany for over a decade of fieldwork in the Colombian Amazon.

Richard F. Kay

Richard F. Kay is a paleoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, known for primate molar anatomy, dental microwear diet analysis, and South American primate evolution.

Richard F. Thompson

Richard F. Thompson (1930–2014) was an American behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who showed the cerebellum is essential for classical conditioning and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1977.

Richard Feachem

Sir Richard Feachem, born in 1947, is a public health scientist who led the Global Fund from 2002 to 2007 and is a UCSF professor emeritus.

Richard Firtel

Richard A. Firtel is an American cell and developmental biologist, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego, known for using the social amoeba Dictyostelium to study how cells sense direction and move.