A National Academy of Engineering member, Richard Lipton's professional career has been primarily in academia. He held faculty appointments at Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University before joining the College of Computing at Georgia Tech faculty. In addition to his computer science academic appointments, Lipton is the founding director of a computer science research laboratory for the Panasonic Corporation. He is currently a chief consulting scientist at Telcordia (formerly known as Bellcore). His research is primarily, but not exclusively, focused on theory. Lipton is recognized as one of the original pioneers in the field of DNA computing, along with Len Adleman.