Richard McCray is the George Gamow Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics, Emeritus, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Professor McCray received a B.S. from Stanford University in 1959 and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967. He was a postdoc at Caltech (1967-68), an Assistant Professor at the Harvard College Observatory (1968-71), and a Professor at the University of Colorado since then.

His research includes the theory of the heating, cooling, chemistry and dynamics of interstellar gas; the physics of compact cosmic X-ray sources; and the physics of supernovae and supernova remnants. He also uses the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra Observatory to observe these phenomena.

He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Dannie S. Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics.