Rice is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences and was president of the American Society for Virology from 2002 to 2003. He received the 2016 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, jointly with Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager and Michael J. Sofia.[2][3] Along with Michael Houghton and Harvey J. Alter, he was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus."[4]