Directory Profile

By day Todd Richmond is the director of the Mixed Reality Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and research faculty at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. By night he is a musician and conceptual troublemaker. In a previous life, Todd was a chemistry professor at The Claremont Colleges. Early-on he incorporated multimedia and web technologies into his teaching and research, leading him to pursue a broader understanding of technology and content at USC. He led the Annenberg Center for Communication, a new media research center, that focused on work exploring the emerging digital capabilities. In 2006 he moved to the ICT as a project director, looking at ways to leverage new technologies for training and learning. His current efforts encompass a broad scope of emerging technologies (particularly Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence) and their implications/applications for training, learning, operations, and humanity. On the music tip he has studied with Grammy-winning bassist Victor Wooten, and performs regularly around southern California in a variety of ensembles. Todd earned a B.A. in chemistry from the University of San Diego, Ph.D in chemistry from Caltech, and was a post-doctoral fellow in protein engineering at U.C. San Francisco. He has been an invited speaker at TEDx, SxSW and other conferences and events as well as featured on CBS News, NPR, Voice of America and other press, often serving as a reality-check for AR, VR, AI, IoT, and other emerging disruptive technologies.