Eric D. Isaacs, Ph.D.

Eric Isaacs became president of Research Corporation for Science Advancement on July 1, 2025.

Before joining RCSA, Isaacs served as president of the Carnegie Institute for Science from 2018 to 2024. During his tenure at Carnegie, he led the strategic reorganization of the 120-year-old independent research institution to strengthen its interdisciplinary research capabilities. He developed a formal research partnership with Caltech that included plans for a new state-of-the-art research facility in Pasadena and served on the board of the Giant Magellan Telescope as a founding member of the international coalition to build the 25-meter instrument at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Previously, as Executive Vice President for Research, Innovation and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago, he oversaw more than $1.5 billion in sponsored research, including forefront science and engineering at the University of Chicago Medical Center, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. He also served as the university’s provost, and director of the Argonne National Laboratory. 

Isaacs received his B.A. in Physics from Beloit College, his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories. His scientific interests are broad ranging, from astrophysics and materials physics to evolutionary biology and energy technologies. As an experimental physicist, he studied novel electronic and magnetic materials with a focus on creating images of novel phenomena in reciprocal and real space at the nanoscale. He developed several modern synchrotron-based X-ray scattering techniques, including magnetic X-ray diffraction, inelastic X-ray scattering, X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, and hard X-ray nanoprobe. 

He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and the American Physical Society.

Isaacs lives in Tucson with his wife, Linda F. Goldwyn, an attorney and writer.