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Richard P. Lifton — the president of Rockefeller University — will join the Harvard Corporation in July, the University announced Monday.

Lifton was elected by the Corporation and confirmed by the Board of Overseers — Harvard’s second-highest governing body — which convened for meetings in Harvard Square over the weekend to prepare a response to the Trump administration’s $9 billion ultimatum.

Lifton will succeed Shirley M. Tilghman, the former president of Princeton University, who has served on Harvard’s highest governing body since 2016.

Tilghman’s planned departure, which was first announced Monday, comes before the end of her second six-year term. A second member of the Corporation — Theodore V. Wells Jr. — concluded his 12 years on the board in January, but neither his departure date nor plans for his successor have been made public. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on whether Wells would leave the Corporation this year.

Lifton, a longtime biomedical researcher, was a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School from 1986 to 1993, before moving to Yale University, where he served as chair of the Department of Genetics and was named a Sterling Professor — Yale’s highest academic honor. At Yale, Lifton also directed two research centers focused on investigating the genetic basis of hypertension and kidney function.

Lifton was tapped to lead Rockefeller University, a graduate-only university focused on biomedical research, in 2016. He also serves as Rockefeller’s director of the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 praised Lifton’s commitment to the “progress and promise of science” and the “advancement of higher education” in a press release.

“Rick is known to colleagues as a person of deep integrity, extraordinary intellectual curiosity and creativity, exceptional incisiveness, and sound judgment,” they wrote. “We look forward to welcoming Rick Lifton to the Corporation this summer, as we navigate these consequential and challenging times for our own university and others.”

Unlike many members of the Corporation, Lifton is not a prominent Harvard donor. He will become the second current member of the Corporation to not have graduated from Harvard.

Lifton’s appointment comes as Harvard becomes increasingly entangled in a tug-of-war with Republicans in Washington — and as the Corporation determines whether the University will challenge or concede to threats to its funding, endowment, and academic programming.

Since Trump’s first presidency, Lifton has emerged as a fierce defender of funding for life sciences research. In 2017, he slammed the Trump administration’s decision to slash National Institutes of Health’s funding as “unprecedented and catastrophic for our health, security, and economy.”

Lifton has previously served on advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He also sat on an advisory body for the Massachusetts General Hospital alongside Garber for four years.

During Lifton’s term on the Corporation, Harvard will also pick a successor to Garber, who is set to leave his post in 2027. The search for his replacement is set to begin in 2026 and will likely be led by a search committee composed of all 12 Corporation fellows and three Overseers.

Lifton has participated in several presidential search committees before, including ones at Yale and the National Academy of Medicine.

Lifton said in a press release that he was excited to ensure “that Harvard sustains and enhances its exceptional contributions to society.”

“Harvard is a national treasure for its leadership in education, scholarship, and research. Its generation of new knowledge advances the betterment of humanity with global impact,” he said.

Lifton will serve for a six-year term with the possibility of extending his tenure for a second term.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.