Richard E. Lenski (born August 13, 1956) is an American evolutionary biologist.[1] He is the son of sociologist Gerhard Lenski. He earned his BA from Oberlin College in 1976, and his PhD from the University of North Carolina in 1982.[2] He is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds the office Hannah Distinguished Professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University. In 1996, Lenski won a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2006 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
Lenski is best known for his long-term E. coli evolution experiment and his work with digital organisms, using Avida. On February 17, 2010, he co-founded the NSF Science and Technology Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, known as the BEACON Center.