Richard Errett Smalley (born June 6, 1943) is a professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for discovery of fullerene (with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex). He was born in Akron, Ohio and attended Hope College before tranferring to the University of Michigan where he received his B.S. in 1965. He received his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973.
He is currently working on carbon nanotubes and associated nanotechnologies.