Richard M Crutcher received his PhD in astronomy at UCLA in 1972, followed by a postdoctoral position in radio astronomy at Caltech. He became an assistant professor in the Astronomy Department at the University of Illinois in 1974, served as department chair for five years, and retired from his Illinois professorship in 2010. He also served as Senior Associate Director and Chief Application Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and served on the Boards of the BIMA and CARMA millimeter arrays, the Dark Energy Survey, the LSST, and the AIPS++ (now CASA) software project. His research interests have included uv, optical, and near-infrared interstellar line observations and radio observations of molecular clouds and regions of star formation. His interest in magnetic fields started with an attempt to detect the Zeeman effect in OH lines from dark clouds at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory during his postdoc, and continued throughout his career with observations of polarized dust emission and the Zeeman effect in H I, OH, and CN lines at centimeter and millimetre wavelengths with telescopes all over the world. He has authored or co-authored about 200 papers and articles in refereed journals and books, including nearly 100 on observational studies of interstellar magnetic fields.