Cecilia Richards
canadian-American mechanical engineer
Cecilia Dianne (Cill) Richards is a retired Canadian and American mechanical engineer, known for her work on small-scale heat engines and on microelectromechanical systems. She is a professor emerita at Washington State University.
Education and career
Richards majored in mathematics at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1977. After graduation, she began working on solar energy with professors at the university, inspiring her interest in engineering. She continued at the university for a second bachelor's in mechanical engineering in 1981.
While working in industry as an engineer in Vancouver and Southern California from 1981 to 1986, she earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering through the University of British Columbia in 1985. Next, she entered doctoral study at the University of California, Irvine, completing her doctorate in 1990, under the supervision of Scott Samuelsen. She became the first woman to earn a doctorate in mechanical engineering there.
After postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Richards joined the Washington State University faculty as an assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering in 1992. She was tenured as an associate professor in 1998 and promoted to full professor in 2005.
“Cecilia Richards” enters the record as canadian-American mechanical engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cecilia, Richards and canadian-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q114648648. VIAF identifies the subject as 7241160667644003560001. The Library of Congress control number is no00009608. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1981, 1986 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cecilia Richards” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.