Richard McCray

Richard Alan McCray (24 November 1937 – 26 October 2021) was an American astronomer and astrophysicist.

McCray received his B.S. in physics from Stanford University in 1959 and his Ph.D. in physics in 1967 from the University of California, Los Angeles with thesis advisor Peter Goldreich. McCray was a research fellow at Caltech from 1967 to 1968 and then an assistant professor at Harvard University from 1968 to 1971. At the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences of the University of Colorado Boulder, he was from 1971 to 1975 an associate professor, from 1975 to 1997 a full professor, from 1997 to 2004 the George Gamow Distinguished Professor Astrophysics, and from 2004 to 2013 a professor emeritus. Since 2013, he has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was a visiting scholar at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the NASA in 1983–1984, at Peking University and Nanjing University in Fall 1987, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Spring 1988, at Columbia University in 1989–1990, and at the University of California, Berkeley in Spring 1997. He was elected in 1989 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2004 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1990 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics.