Richard A. Mathies was born in 1946. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Washington in 1968, his M.S. from Cornell University in 1970, and Ph.D. also from Cornell in 1974. From 1974 to 1976, he was a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at Yale University. Later, from 1979 to 1981, he was an Alfred Pl Sloan Fellow. He is no Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, where he has spent most of his career.

Throughout his career, he has won a number of awards, including the Harold Lamport Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Society for Photobiology Research Award, the Frederick Conference on capillary Electrophoresis Award, the Association for Laboratory Automation Research Award, and OSA’s Ellis R. Lippincott Award. He is a Fellow of OSA and the Royal Academy of Chemistry.