Richard Goodman

Goodman received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from MIT in 1970 and was in the first MSTP class, at Penn, where, in 1976, he received MD and PhD degrees. He trained in internal medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center (NEMC) and endocrinology at NEMC and the Massachusetts General Hospital, working in the laboratory of Joel Habener. Among his accomplishments during this time, Goodman, with Kay Lund, identified GLP-1, the basis of the weight-loss drug Ozempic. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard in 1982 then returned to NEMC to become the founding director of the Molecular Medicine division, an interdisciplinary program from which four of the six faculty members went on to be elected into the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Goodman became the Vollum director in 1989, a position he held for 27 years. Throughout his tenure as director, Vollum faculty received many accolades at the national and international level. Goodman was elected into the NAS in 2002 and the National Institute of Medicine in 2005; he received the Distinguished Graduate award from Penn in 2013.