Richard A. Mathies is Dean of the College of Chemistry and Gilbert Newton Lewis Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his Bachelors degree from the University of Washington, and his Masters and PhD at Cornell University working with A. C. Albrecht. Following post-doctoral training at Yale as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow with L. Stryer, he moved to Berkeley where he has been ever since. He is recipient of numerous awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, Harold Lamport Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, American Society for Photobiology Research Award, Frederick Conference on Capillary Electrophoresis Award, Association for Laboratory Automation Research Award, and Ellis R. Lippincott Award (2004). He has been A.D. Little Lecturer at M.I.T., and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy.
Mathies' research interests include excited-state reaction dynamics in photoactive proteins and the development of microfabricated chemical and biochemical analysis devices. Part of his group studies the photochemistry of vision and other photoactivated reactions with femtosecond stimulated Raman scattering, which enables the structural characterization of short-lived intermediate states in chemical reactions. Another part of his group works on the development of microfabricated biochemical analysis systems; portions of this work had a significant impact on the sequencing of the human genome. Microfabricated analysis systems are also being developed for forensic analysis, clinical analysis and space exploration. He has authored or co-authored over 450 publications and patents.