Richard Hodes, M.D., is the Director of the National Institute of Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a Diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine. In 1995 Dr. Hodes was elected as a member of The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives; in 1997 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and, in 1999 he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He also maintains an active involvement in research on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, through his direction of the Immune Regulation Section, a laboratory devoted to studying regulation of the immune system, focused on cellular and molecular events that activate the immune response. 

In the past Dr. Hodes acted as a clinical investigator in the National Cancer Institute, then as the Deputy Chief and Acting Chief of the Cancer Institute's Immunology Branch. Since 1982 he has served as Program Coordinator for the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Cancer Research Program, and since 1992 on the scientific advisory board of the Cancer Research Institute. Dr. Hodes received his M.D. degree from the Harvard Medical School and completed a research fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and clinical training in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital.