He got his Ph.D. at CMU in 1997 where he worked with Tom Mitchell and Herb Simon. Before joining the faculty at Cornell in 2001 Rich was a researcher at Just Research (JPRC) and visiting faculty in the Medical School at UCLA and at CMU's Center for Learning and Discovery (CALD). Rich's research is in machine learning and data mining, and applications of these to medical decision making, bioinformatics, and weather forecasting. He is best known for his work in inductive transfer, semi- supervised learning, and optimizing learning for different performance criteria. Rich likes to mix algorithm development with applications work to insure that the methods he developes really work in practice.