Richard H. Ebright

Richard H. Ebright, Ph.D., is Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute, and Founder and Chief Executive Officer at APY Therapeutics, LLC.  He directs a laboratory of five postdoctoral associates, graduate students, and technicians.

His research focusses on the structure, mechanism, and regulation of bacterial transcription complexes, and on the development of inhibitors of bacterial transcription as antituberculosis drugs and broad‑spectrum antibacterial drugs.  His research employs tools of structural biology, biophysics, and drug-discovery.

He received his A.B. (Biology, summa cum laude) and Ph.D. (Microbiology and Molecular Genetics) degrees from Harvard University.  He performed graduate research at Harvard and the Institut Pasteur and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows.  In 1987, he was appointed as a Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute and a faculty member at Rutgers University.  From 1997 to 2013, he was co-appointed as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

He has received the Searle Scholar Award, the Schering-Plough Award of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Walter J. Johnson Prize, the Waksman Award of the Theobald Smith Society, the MERIT Award of the National Institutes of Health, and the Chancellor's Award for Research Excellence of Rutgers University.  He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

He has 185 publications and 52 issued and pending patents.

He served for sixteen years as editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology.  He has served on the National Institutes of Health Molecular Biology Study Section and on National Institutes of Health special emphasis panels.  He is Co-Founder and Board member of Biosafety Now, is a member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Global Biolabs Project, and has been a member of the Antimicrobial Resistance Committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, and the Controlling Dangerous Pathogens Project of the Center for International Security Studies.  He has testified at US House and US Senate hearings on biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management.