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Charlie Rice is the Head of the Laboratory for Virology and Infectious Disease at the Rockefeller University. He is a prominent figure in research on members of the Flaviviridae, including hepatitis C virus.
Rice received his bachelor’s degree from University of California, Davis, in 1974 and earned his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1981. He remained at Caltech for 4 years to do postdoctoral research and moved to the Washington University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 1986. While at Caltech, he was involved in researching the genome of the Sindbis virus and establishing that flaviviruses are their own family of viruses. The strain of yellow fever virus involved in this work was eventually used for the development of the yellow fever vaccine.
Rice has been the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor at Rockefeller University since 2001. Here, he has championed the development of an animal model for hepatitis C. The lack of a suitable model has hampered the development of an outright cure or a protective vaccine, but Rice managed to close in on an animal model for the disease while uncovering new insights into the workings of HCV.
He is a past President of the American Society for Virology and has served on committees for the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and World Health Organization. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the M. W. Beijernick, Dautrebande, Robert Koch, InBev Baillet-Latour prizes, and the Lasker-Debakey Clinical Medical Research Award.