Rate My Professor Gordon Richards

Gordon T. Richards is a Professor of Physics at Drexel University, where his research in Space Science focuses on quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers accreting new material. He earned an AB cum laude in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 1994, an SM in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1995, and a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 2000. Richards began his career as a Research Associate at The Pennsylvania State University from 2000 to 2002, followed by Research Associate and SDSS Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2002 to 2005, and Gordon and Betty Moore Fellow and Associate Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University from 2005 to 2006. He joined Drexel University in 2006 as Assistant Professor of Physics, became Associate Professor in 2010, and was promoted to Professor in 2015.

Richards excels in identifying quasars and AGNs using modern statistical methods on imaging data from large astronomical sky surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. His interests include accretion disks feeding supermassive black holes, the influence of ejected mass and energy on galaxy evolution, and quasar samples as probes of the Universe's structure. He employs space-based observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory, as well as ground-based facilities including the Very Large Array radio telescope. As co-chair of the LSST AGN Science Collaboration and a member of the AGN science collaboration for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera Rubin Observatory, he contributes significantly to upcoming surveys. Richards has co-authored more than 250 refereed journal articles and serves as principal investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA. Key publications include "Probing the Wind Component of Radio Emission in Luminous High-Redshift Quasars" (Richards et al., Astronomical Journal, 2021), "Characterizing Quasar C IV Emission-line Measurements from Time-resolved Spectroscopy" (Rivera et al., Astrophysical Journal, 2020), "Narrow, intrinsic C IV absorption in quasars as it relates to outflows, orientation, and radio properties" (Stone & Richards, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2019), and "The Clustering of High-redshift (2.9 < z < 5.1) Quasars in SDSS Stripe 82" (Timlin et al., Astrophysical Journal, 2018). His honors include the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (2013 and 2017), Provost’s Award for Outstanding Scholarly Productivity (2017), and Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher listing (2014, 2015, 2016). He currently chairs the Faculty Senate Budget, Process, and Development Committee.