Richard Collins Lord was born in Louisville, Kentucky on October 10, 1910. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1936. He spent two years, from 1936 to 1938, as a Fellow of the United States National Research Council, first at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
In 1942, Lord began work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when the National Defense Research Committee called him to serve as a technical aide and later as deputy chief in the Committee's optics division. During World War II, he was involved in the development of guided missiles as well as with military applications of infrared radiation.
In 1946, MIT appointed him Director of the Spectroscopy Laboratory and in 1954, Professor of Chemistry. In collaboration with George R. Harrison and J.R. Loofbourow, Lord published the widely used text Practical Spectroscopy in 1948.
Lord is considered a pioneer in the use of infrared radiation for the study of molecular structure. He is widely recognized for developments in the interpretation of infrared spectra of molecules in terms of their vibrational motion. He also contributed to the understanding of the cohesion of molecules by means of hydrogen bonding. His studies of the laser Raman spectroscopy of proteins and nucleic acids opened a new field of research.