Richard Gregory was born on the 24th July, 1923 in London. His father, Christopher Clive Langton Gregory, was an astronomer and the first director of the University of London.
In 1947 he got a scholarship from the R.A.F to go to Downing College, Cambridge where he chose to read Philosophy and Experimental Psychology. On completing his studies Gregory stayed on at Cambridge, working in the Applied Psychology Unit, which was owned and run by the Medical Research Council. It was here that he investigated the case of Sidney Bradford, a rare case of an adult who recovered from blindness, from this he showed that exploratory touch is very important for visual perception
In 1967 he founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception in the University of Edinburgh along with Professor Donald Michie and Professor Christopher Longuet-Higgins. In 1972 Gregory founded the journal "Perception" which is still published today and in 1978 he founded the Exploratory Hands-On science centre in Bristol with funding from the Nuffield Foundation. This was the first such place in Britain and attracted over two million visitors before it closed in 1999.
Richard Gregory is the recipient of many honours and prizes, amongst them the Waverley Gold Medal, for inventing the Solid-Image Microscope (1960) C.B.E (1989) Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1992) and the Hughling Jackson Gold Medal, from the Royal Society of Medicine (1999)
