Charles Moen Rice (born August 25, 1952) is an American virologist and Nobel Prize laureate whose main area of research is the hepatitis C virus.

In 1981, he received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology, where he studied RNA viruses in the laboratory of James Strauss.

[9][10] After his postdoctoral work, Rice moved with his research group to the Washington University School of Medicine in 1986, where he remained until 2001.

While exploring Sindbis virus at Washington University in St. Louis, Rice described how he produced infectious flavivirus RNA in the laboratory in a 1989 paper published in The New Biologist.

In 2005, Rice was also part of a team that showed that a strain of an acute form of the virus identified in a human patient can be forced to replicate in a laboratory setting.