Richard Carthew, Ph.D.

Richard Carthew is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he received a Ph.D. in biology from MIT. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California, Berkeley, he held a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 2001. He is the inaugural director of the NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, established in 2023 in Chicago. His primary research focuses on the patterns of shape and form in complex animals. He was also a pioneer in elucidating the mechanisms whereby small RNA molecules can regulate gene expression across the eukaryota (nucleus-bearing cellular life). Carthew is a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow and a Pew Biomedical Scholar.