Richard Wigmans was born in the Netherlands. He studied physics in Amsterdam (PhD, 1975). Until 1991, he worked at CERN as a research scientist. He engaged in the fundamental aspects of calorimetry, in particular the compensation mechanism. In 1991, he relocated to the USA, attracted by the prospects of the Superconducting Super Collider then under construction in Texas, where Texas Tech University offered him an endowed chair in the department of physics. In 2012, the Institute of Elecrical and Electronics Engineers awarded him the Outstanding Achievement award for Radiation Instrumentation. Wigmans is considered one of the world's leading experts on calorimetric particle detection.