Richard S. Sutton is a recipient of the ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computing science, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Rich’s life is devoted to understanding the simple general principles that he believes underlie both natural and artificial intelligence, and to sharing that understanding with the world. For the most part, his research is conducted at Oak Lab, a startup he co-founded with Khurram Javed in 2026, and shared through teaching and mentorship at the University of Alberta, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and the Openmind Research Institute, which he founded in 2023. Earlier Rich studied at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts, and worked at GTE Labs, AT&T Labs, DeepMind, and Keen Technologies. His scientific publications have been cited almost 200,000 times and include the defining textbook on reinforcement learning. Rich is a libertarian, a chess player, and a cancer survivor.