Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet. He was born in London and is half Norwegian. He qualified in physiology and medicine from the University of Birmingham in 1986.
He then joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. Richard was the first President of the World Association of Medical Editors and he is a Past-President of the US Council of Science Editors.
He is an honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University College London, and the University of Oslo. He has also received honorary doctorates in medicine from the University of Birmingham, UK, and the Universities of Umea and Gothenburg in Sweden. He is a Council member of University of Birmingham. In 2011, he was appointed co- chair of the independent Expert Review Group overseeing delivery of the UN Secretary-General’s Global Strategy of Women’s and Children’s Health.
He is a Senior Associate of the UK health-policy think-tank, the Nuffield Trust.
Richard received the Edinburgh medal in 2007 and the Dean’s medal from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in 2009. He has written two reports for the Royal College of Physicians of London: Doctors in Society (2005) and Innovating for Health (2009). He wrote Health Wars (2003) about contemporary issues in medicine and health, and he has written regularly for The New York Review of Books and the TLS. He has a strong interest in global health and medicine’s contribution to our wider culture. In 2011, he was elected a Foreign Associate of the US Institute of Medicine.