Professor Richard Hills

Prof. Richard Hills FRS, who died on June 5^th 2022, was an undergraduate exhibitioner at Queens’, reading Natural Sciences, from 1964 to 1967. His father had been at the college before the war, and they even shared the legendary Dr. Maxwell as a Mathematics tutor. John Baldwin, a fellow of Queens’ and later a colleague of Richard’s, was one of his supervisors and had a formative influence in his decision to pursue radio astronomy as a career.

After Cambridge, Richard was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time a place of both immense scientific importance and social and political upheaval. While there he developed a particular interest in the design of radio telescopes and their combination into interferometric arrays that was to form the basis of his professional work. He also, in by far the most important event of his life, met Beverly Bevis, with whom he shared first the excitements of late 60s California and then all that followed. They married in 1973 and she survives him.

Following Berkeley, he worked for a year on the recently completed Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany, before returning to Cambridge to join the Radio Astronomy Group, part of the Physics department, in 1974. He remained at Cambridge for the rest of his career, becoming Professor of Radio Astronomy, and a fellow of St. Edmund’s College, in 1990. His work was focused on 2 large international telescope collaborations – the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in Chile. He served as Project Scientist during each of their completions, living in Hawaii with his very grateful young family in 1985 and 86, and Chile with Beverly from 2007 to 2012. He retired following the completion of ALMA and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. His retirement, though, was more in name than in spirit, and he remained active providing guidance and expertise to a huge range of radio astronomy projects until the very last days of his life.

Richard was immensely fortunate in finding a career that, while demanding, gave him enormous pleasure. Outside work he loved travel, especially to anywhere with mountains, viewing eclipses, spending time with his family, listening to music and living well, often managing to do all these things at the same time. As well as Beverly, he is survived by his sons Alex and Chris, both musicians, and grandchildren Max and Asis.

Alex Hills
October 2022