"After his BSc Hons in Zoology at University College London (1965) and PhD at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (1968), Richard spent short periods at the University of Bristol and at the CERL Fawley Marine Laboratory before becoming a UTO in the Cambridge Zoology Department from 1972 to 2011. His fieldwork is now carried out mainly from Rhodes (South Africa) and Queensland (Australia), via his honorary positions on the research staff of those universities, being then based at the Knysna Field Laboratory and Moreton Bay Research Station respectively. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine's College Cambridge. At various times in the recent past he has been Chairman of the European Union for Coastal Conservation (U.K.) and Secretary of the Estuarine & Coastal Sciences Association (of which he was one of the founders). He is also the author of several books, including An Introduction to Marine Ecology (with Roger Hughes of Bangor) [Blackwell Science 1982, 1988, 1999], The Invertebrates (with Peter Calow of Sheffield and Peter Olive of Newcastle) [Blackwell Science 1988, 1993, 2001], Estuarine Biology [Arnold 1974, 1984], Coastal Lagoons [CUP 1980] and The Brackish-Water Fauna of Northwestern Europe [CUP 1994]. He is a recipient of the Linnean Society of London's bicentenary medal. In total his publications have received >3,500 citations, with a Google Scholar h-index of 28."

Richard is a marine and brackish-water ecologist interested in the benthic invertebrate communities of soft coastal sediments, especially in the spatial patterns of variation displayed by their biodiversity and related phenomena, from latitudinal scales at one extreme to sub-1 m ones at the other. He studies the macrofaunal assemblages that dominate intertidal seagrass beds, mangrove swamps, and bare expanses of sand and mud in a variety of geographical regions, especially in the Garden Route National Park (Western Cape, RSA) and the Moreton Bay Marine Park (Australia), but also in central Indonesia (Taman Nasional Wakatobi), Seychelles (Curieuse Marine National Park) and north-western Europe (including the north Norfolk coast and the Anse Lostrouc'h).