Richard Charles Thompson is a marine biologist who researches marine litter. At the University of Plymouth he is director of the Marine Institute; professor of Marine Biology; and leads the International Marine Litter Research Unit. In 2025, Time magazine listed him as one of the world's 100 most influential people.
Thompson was educated at University of Newcastle and the University of Liverpool, where he was awarded a PhD in 1996.
Thompson's paper, Lost at Sea: Where is All the Plastic?, published in the journal Science in 2004, has been reported to be the first to use the term microplastics in relation to plastic pollution, which has since become common parlance. However, there are examples of the term being used in relation to marine pollution dating back to the early 1990s, and there is evidence that the authors who first used the term had been exploring the topic for several years before.
Since 2010 he has been professor of Marine Biology at the University of Plymouth. Since 2018 he has also been director of the Marine Institute, part of the School of Biological and Marine Sciences at the university. He also leads the university's International Marine Litter Research Unit.
He is a co-coordinator of The Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, and in September 2024 led a further study - also published in Science - which stated that after two decades of research into microplastics, the world had sufficient evidence to agree global action to tackle them.
In 2016, Professor Thompson was referred to by Mary Creagh as "The Godfather of Microplastics" during a public inquiry into the Environmental Impact of Microplastics by the Environmental Audit Select Committee. This moniker has since been repeated extensively by media outlets across the world.