Richard H. Ebright, Ph.D., is Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology.  He directs a laboratory of approximately ten postdoctoral associates, graduate students, and technicians and serves as project leader on three National Institutes of Health research grants ("Prokaryotic Transcription Termination," "Therapeutics for Drug-Resistant Bacteria," and "Treatments for Tuberculosis and Non-Tuberculous Mycobacterial Lung Infections: Dual-Targeted Rifamycin-AAP Conjugates").

His research focusses on the structure, mechanism, and regulation of bacterial transcription complexes, and on the development of inhibitors of bacterial transcription as antituberculosis agents and broad-spectrum antibacterial agents.  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 Walter J. Johnson Prize, the Schering-Plough Award of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Waksman Award of the Theobold Smith Society, the MERIT Award of the National Institutes of Health, and the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research 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 more than one hundred seventy-five publications and more than forty 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 a member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University, and he 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.