Richard Rand earned his bachelors degree from UC Berkeley, majoring in physics and astronomy, and his PhD in astronomy from Caltech.  After postdocs at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Maryland, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics & Astronomy in 1996.  He has been the Department Chair since 2019.  His research focuses on interstellar gas in nearby galaxies, and he is mainly interested in the gaseous halos of galaxies, the nature of spiral structure, collisional ring galaxies and interstellar magnetic fields.  He has used radio, optical, millimeter-wave, and space-based infrared telescopes in his work.