Professor Richards is an expert in identifying quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) through modern statistical methods using imaging data (pictures) from large astronomical sky surveys, notably the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars and AGNs are galaxies in which new material is currently falling into supermassive black holes at their centers. Dr. Richards is interested in understanding the accretion disks that feed these massive black holes, how mass and energy ejected from these black holes influence the evolution of galaxies over time, and how large quasar samples may serve as statistical probes of the structure of the Universe.