Richard Edwin Hills FRS FRAS (30 September 1945 – 5 June 2022)[2][1] was a British astronomer who was emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.

[3] Born on 30 September 1945 and educated at Bedford School, Hills studied the Natural Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge and then went to the University of California, Berkeley to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Hills was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn between 1972 and 1974, before he returned to the University of Cambridge and became involved in the development of telescopes and instrumentation for astronomy at wavelengths of around one millimetre—the spectral region that lies between radio waves and infrared—which is relatively unexplored.

[9] His nomination for the Royal Society reads: Since the early 1970s Richard Hills has played a leading role in the development of radio astronomy at millimetre wavelengths, an essential zone of the spectrum for the study of star formation in galaxies.

These demonstrated the full angular resolution obtained by phase-coherent aperture synthesis which requires continuous monitoring of atmospheric absorption along the line of sight above each antenna.