Richard is an atmospheric physicist, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and formerly the Burden Professor of Meteorology at Harvard. He was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report on the science of climate change. An author of more than 230 peer-reviewed papers, he holds degrees in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard, though his doctoral thesis was on the interaction of radiation and chemistry with the dynamics of the stratosphere. He has continued to work on the physics of the atmosphere since then.