Richard Edwin Hills. 30 September 1945—5 June 2022

Richard Hills was a pioneering, world-leading millimetre astronomer. As fresh graduate students, he and Michael Janssen built the world’s first millimetre interferometer. His research was characterized by the full range of experimental, observational and theoretical activities as the telescopes became more powerful and the scientific opportunities broadened out. The highlights of his contributions include his key roles as project scientist for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, still the world’s largest single dish for submillimetre astronomy, and for the ALMA millimetre/submillimetre array in Chile. His career spanned the evolution of millimetre astronomy from the ‘Wild West’ of the 1960s to the sophisticated aperture synthesis ALMA array which is revolutionizing our understanding of star and planet formation and the astrophysics of the distant Universe of galaxies.