Paul Richards received his B.A. in 1956 from Harvard and his Ph.D. in 1960 from Berkeley. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University he did physics research at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He joined the Physics faculty at Berkeley in 1966. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has been a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Miller Professor, and a Humboldt Foundation Fellow. In 1981 he was selected California Scientist of the Year. In 1997 he received the Button Medal of the (British) Institute of Physics. He received the 2000 Frank Isakson Prize of the American Physical Society for Optical Effects in Solids.