Richard Losick is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, the Maria Moors Cabot Professor of Biology, and a Harvard College Professor. He received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1965 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1969. He was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow in 1969, and he joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1972. He is a past chairman of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Cellular and Developmental Biology. He teaches the introductory course on molecular biology at Harvard College, and is Head Tutor for the undergraduate concentration in Biochemical Sciences.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a former Visiting Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He is the 2007 winner of the Selman A. Waksman Award of the National Academy of Sciences.