As the child of a military physicist, Richard Lifton was forced to move around a lot, from Washington D.C., to Albuquerque, New Mexico to Ankara, Turkey. As an adult he settled in Connecticut, where he became a renowned geneticist at Yale University.
Now he’s on the move again, relocating to New York, where he faces perhaps his biggest challenge yet: serving as president of one of the city’s famed research institutions, Rockefeller University, and in so doing taking over for Marc Tessier-Lavigne, someone widely seen as igniting the city’s biotech scene.