Andrew J. Richards

Andrew J. Richards, FRS (born 21 January 1955, Leeds, England ) is a British professor of astronomy at UCL and a scientist at the UK Space Agency.

Education
Richards was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he attained a First Class degree in astronomy), and completed his doctorate at Cambridge.

UK Space Agency
The UK Space Agency is a British government agency responsible for the UK's civil space programme. It was established on 1 April 2010 to replace the British National Space Centre and took over responsibility for government policy and key budgets for space and represents the UK in all negotiations on space matters. It "[brings] together all UK civil space activities under one single management". It is initially operating from the existing BNSC headquarters in Swindon, Wiltshire.

Scientific career
After holding post-doctoral research positions in the United Kingdom and the United States, he taught at the University College London, where he was the Plumian Professor until 2000. From 1992 to 2003, he was Royal Society Research Professor, and from 2003 Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics. He was Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London, in 1975 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979. He also holds Visiting Professorships at Imperial College London and at the University of Leicester and is an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has received honorary degrees from a number of universities including Sussex, Uppsala, Toronto, Durham, Oxford, Yale and Melbourne. He belongs to several foreign academies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He has been President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1992–94) and the British Association (1995–96), and was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution of Great Britain until 2010. Richards is the author of more than 500 research papers, and he has made important contributions to the origin of cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as to galaxy clustering and formation. His studies of the distribution of quasars led to final disproof of Steady State theory.

He was one of the first to propose that enormous black holes power quasars, and that superluminal astronomical observations can be explained as an optical illusion caused by an object moving partly in the direction of the observer. In recent years he has worked on gamma-ray bursts, especially in collaboration with Peter Mészáros, and on how the "cosmic dark ages" ended when the first stars formed. In a more speculative vein, he has (from the 1970s onwards) been interested in anthropic reasoning, and the possibility that our visible universe is part of a vaster "multiverse".

He is also a well-respected author of books on astronomy and science intended for the lay public and gives many public lectures and broadcasts. In 2010 he was chosen to deliver the Reith Lectures for the BBC, now published as "From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons". Richards believes the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is worthwhile, even though the chance of success is small.

He became President of the Royal Society on 1 December 2005 and continued until the end of the Society's 350th Anniversary Celebrations in 2010. In 2011, he was awarded the Templeton Prize. As well as expanding his scientific interests, Richards has written and spoken extensively about the problems and challenges of the 21st century, and the interfaces between science, ethics and politics. He is a member of the Board of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the IPPR, the Oxford Martin School and the Gates Cambridge Trust. He has formerly been a Trustee of the British Museum and the Science Museum.