Professor Richards is the Lawrence Brown Chair in Vascular Surgery, Head of Division of Surgery and Director of the Clinical Trials Unit at University of Western Australia (UWA). He is also Honorary Professor at the Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, University College London (UCL) and Honorary Professor of Anaesthesia at Monash University.

Professor Richards has led a series of international clinical trials and supervised 16 PhD students and well over 60 graduate research projects (Masters/ MSc/BSc).  He is a mentor to trainees in surgical research internationally. He is actively engaged the international trials networks; the International VASCC & UK VERN Research Group in vascular surgery. Professor Richards has over 150 peer reviewed publications and $14M of research funding in the last decade.

Professor Richards has a specific interest in collaborative research involving medical students and junior doctors through TASMAN, STRIVE and StarSurg. He is the founder and director of STRIVEwa the pan-WA student network with over 130 GCP trained medical students involved in research. With RACS CTANZ and TASMAN he is leading the largest Australian and New Zealand clinical trial in surgery, POSTvenTT with over 540 collaborators. He has personally enrolled over 1000 patients to more than 20 major clinical trials in the last decade. As Director of the UWA CTU he has developed and promoted clinical trials for several members of the UWA faculty including Professor Dickon Hayne and Professor Sean Hood. With rising profile the CTU is aiming to support a dozen such trials and researchers over the next few years.

Professor Richards developed the Centre for Research Excellence (CoRE) to promote quality and collaboration to facility research and clinical trials. 2020 & 2021 saw highly successful outputs with 15-20 manuscripts published p.a. including The Lancet, BJA and BJS reaching a total of 190 peer reviewed publications cited > 8000 times with > 25,000 downloads. Importantly a notable shift to anonymous collaborative outputs, highlighting and supporting inclusivity and facilitation for the next generation of researchers. Overall funding and awards now total $6M in W.A. contributing to an overall total > $17M from 40 grant awards.

In 2020 the research team lead the research drive to meet the COVID pandemic with development of the COVID Research Response Trial (CRR).  Professor Richards leads the CRR that has built a harmonised platform of research across the five metropolitan health care systems in WA. All patient data is automatically linked to one REDCap (WHO ISARIC) platform in the Department of Health that is linked to biosamples. All data are deidentified and support 8 current COVID trials. This is a unique statewide platform for research in Australia.

Professor Richards was, before COVID lockdowns, a regular speaker at over 75 international conferences in the last five years and is a key opinion leader on clinical trials, Patient Blood Management and Vascular Surgery. He is a board member of NATA (the international association for Patient Blood Management), ACTA (Australian Clinical Trials Alliance) and RACS Academic board.