NIEHS & NTP Director, 2020-2025
Richard Woychik, Ph.D., served as Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Toxicology Program (NTP) from June 2020 to October 2025. In those roles, Woychik oversaw federal funding for biomedical research to discover how the environment influences human health and disease, and he advanced a number of key priorities, such as greater research into the exposome.
Prior to becoming Director, Woychik served as Deputy Director of NIEHS, beginning in that position in 2011. In this role, he assisted the former NIEHS Director, Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., in the formulation and implementation of plans and policies necessary to carry out the NIEHS mission and the administrative management of NIEHS.
As a mammalian geneticist, Woychik has had a number of noteworthy accomplishments. His laboratory was the first to clone and characterize the gene called agouti, which provided molecular insights into obesity and the satiety response in the brain. Additionally, his laboratory was the first to identify a gene mutation associated with polycystic kidney disease, which provided insights into this molecular biology of this important human disease. Also, his laboratory was the first to determine that a member of the protocadherin family was associated with hearing loss in a mouse model, ultimately paving the way to better understanding the molecular basis of Usher syndrome type 1F in humans. Later, his research program focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms associated with how environmental agents influence the epigenetic control of gene expression.
Woychik previously served as president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and also functioned as the director of the laboratory’s National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center. Prior to leading The Jackson Laboratory, Woychik’s professional history also included positions in both academia and industry: chief scientific officer for Lynx Therapeutics, Hayward, CA; head of the Parke-Davis Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, Alameda, CA; professor within the Departments of Pediatrics, Genetics, and Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio; and senior research scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Woychik completed his B.S. and M.S. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned his Ph.D. in molecular biology at Case Western Reserve University in 1984. He received his postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Philip Leder at Harvard Medical School with fellowship support from the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund and from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.