R. Michael Rich

In 2010, UCLA announced its plans to demolish the UCLA Faculty Center and to replace it with a conference center and hotel. Rich was one of the principle organizers of the Adhoc Committee to save the faculty center, rallying faculty and community opinion to preserve the 1959 mid-Century structure that was inspired by Edward Fickett with Austin, Field, and Fry as the supervising architects. Rich assisted in the discovery and identification of an important 10 foot long wooden carved wall by Panelcarve, designed noted mid-century artists Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman. The conference center was built elsewhere on campus and the Faculty Center will undergo renovation.

In collaboration with Livia Origlia from 2002 to 2018, Rich used the NIRSpec infrared spectrograph on Keck II to obtain high resolution spectra of stars in the Galactic bulge and its globular clusters in a series of 30 papers, overcoming the generally high interstellar extinction in that direction. This work also showed that the globular cluster-like stellar system Terzan 5 has a complex internal spread in iron abundance and chemistry. The ultimate spectral resolution selected for the APOGEE survey matched that of these early studies. Rich also led teams working on infrared spectroscopy of the Galactic bulge and the nuclear star cluster, finding roughly normal Solar scaled abundances for red giants with 4 pc of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, Sgr A* and disproving claims of extraordinary abundances of Sc, V, and Y in red giants near Sgr A*

Rich received a Dudley Observatory Career Development Award (1988), was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow from 1991-1993, and received the NASA Group Achievement Award (2004) for his work on the science team (2003-2013) of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer Satellite. In 2012, Rich was recognized with a Certificate of Appreciation from the LA Conservancy, for saving the UCLA Faculty Center building.

Robert Michael Rich (born 1957) is an American astrophysicist. He obtained his B.A. at Pomona College in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 under thesis supervisor Jeremy R. Mould. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie/DTM until 1988 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he was the doctoral thesis adviser to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.