Richard Larson

A native of Toronto, Richard Larson is a professor emeritus of astronomy. He received his BSc and MA degrees in astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1962 and 1963, respectively. On earning his PhD from Caltech in 1968, he joined the Yale faculty as assistant professor. He was appointed professor of astronomy in 1975, and served on the Yale faculty for forty-three years before retiring in 2011. He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 1981 to 1987, and also served for several terms at different times as the director of undergraduate studies in astronomy. Professor Larson served on a number of outside committees including as the Yale representative to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy from 1998 to 2013. 

His primary research interest has been the theory of star formation and related topics such as the formation and evolution of galaxies and the properties of the star-forming interstellar medium in galaxies. Relationships first identified in his 1981 paper “Turbulence and Star Formation in Molecular Clouds” (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 194) became widely known as “Larson’s Laws.” His work has been praised as laying the quantitative foundations for the field of galaxy evolution modeling, and for work on interacting galaxies and the notion of starbursts triggered by galaxy interactions and mergers. Among additional topics, Professor Larson retains strong interest in the formation of black holes and the formation of the first stars in the early universe, as shown in papers he published in 2005–2010.