[1] Richard G. Gordon was born in California and grew up in east San Jose in the Diablo Range foothills.
After a postdoctoral year of teaching and research at Stanford, Gordon also joined Northwestern University faculty of geological sciences.
[10][11][12] In 1995 Gordon joined the faculty of Rice University,[6] where he is currently W. M. Keck Foundation Professor in Geophysics, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
[14] Gordon's research on global tectonics, tectonophysics, and paleomagnetism has earned him an international reputation.
[1] In 1984 Gordon coauthored, with Allan V. Cox and Scott O'Hare, an important paper on palaeomagnetic Euler poles.
[15][1] Gordon's research in tectonophysics has made use of marine geophysics, space geodesy, geodynamics, and numerical modeling.