He is involved in a wide variety of genomic genetics projects from a computational and mathematical perspective. Current interests include genetic variation, evolutionary and population genetics in humans and cichlid fishes, and algorithms and software for high-throughput sequencing and genome assembly.

In the past Richard has led a number of large scale genomics projects, including the 1000 Genomes Project (with David Altshuler at the Broad Institute) and the UK10K project, both of which completed in 2015, and the gorilla reference sequencing project. Previously I worked on sequence analysis software including hidden Markov model (HMM) methods for gene finding and protein similarity detection, jointly authoring a book Biological Sequence analysis with Sean Eddy, Anders Krogh and Graeme Mitchison. I also helped establish a number of reference genomic databases including WormBase for C.elegans biology (using the ACeDB software I co-developed with Jean Thierry-Mieg), Pfam, TreeFam and Ensembl.