I am Fred Richards. I have a B.S. ('85) in Physics (Magna Cum Laude) from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts; I have a an M.S. ('86) and a Ph.D. ('91) in Physics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana, Illinois, and then a postdoctoral research fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC.
As an undergraduate at Northeastern I worked as a co-op student at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for several years. There I learned about the Unix operating system, working on a real-time variant, developing hardware drivers. As a graduate student at the University of Illinois I studied complex chaotic systems and developed simulation software on Unix systems from Sun Microsystems. I also wrote applications on the NeXT operating system. As a postdoc at NCSA I ported quantum Monte Carlo simulation software written for the Cray YMP supercomputer to the the massively parallel Connection Machine CM-2 computer.
After leaving NRL I joined Entropic Research Laboratory, Inc. in Washington, DC (acquired by Microsoft in 2002). There I worked as a Unix/C programmer and became the project development manager for Entropic's TrueTalk text-to-speech software product. I ultimately became the Engineering Manager for the Washington, DC, office, where I oversaw a team developers responsible for much of Entropic's commercial software product line.
I have been working independently since 1998. For a sampling of some of the work I have done, please refer to the Projects page of this site.