Richard Schlegel is a pioneer in human papillomavirus (HPV) research. Schlegel, chair-man of the Department of Pathology at Georgetown University Medical Center, has long studied the protein shell surrounding HPV. Beginning in 1980, Dr. Schlegel was an investigator, then a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and later served as Chief of the Cell Regulation and Transformation Section in the Laboratory of Tumor Virus Biology at NCI. In 1990, he joined GUMC as an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology, and became Chair of that department in 2003.

He serves on the editorial board of the journal Virology and serves as a permanent member of the NIH Virology study section. Dr. Richard Schlegel’s laboratory at Georgetown developed the technology for the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, for which the dominant patent for the vaccine technology was awarded by the U.S. Patent Office in 2005. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the HPV vaccine for use in June 2006.