The History of Science Society has awarded the Sarton Medal for Lifetime Achievement to Robert Richards, the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine.
The Sarton Medal, which is the highest honor the society confers, recognizes a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar.
Richards has served as the director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science at the University of Chicago since 1992, and was appointed the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science in 2004.
He holds appointments in History, Philosophy, Psychology, and in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Richards received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and was made a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2010.
Richards is the author of The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, winner of the University of Chicago Press’ 2011 Gordon J. Laing Prize; The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, a 2004 Laing Prize winner; The Meaning of Evolution: the Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory; Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, winner of the 1988 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society, among others.
He holds an MA in biological psychology and a PhD in philosophy. Richards joined the University faculty in 1978 after completing his UChicago PhD in the History of Science.
The History of Science Society is the world's largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in historical context. Over 3,000 individual and institutional members across the world support the society's mission to foster interest in the history of science and its social and cultural relations.
The Sarton Medal is named for George Sarton, a founder of the History of Science Society.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
