Richard Ahrenkiel is a research professor of metallurgical and materials engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. His area of specialization is the measurement and characterization of photovoltaic cells and materials, and he is one of the world experts in the area of carrier recombination and carrier lifetime. He has invented a unique technique for measuring the excess carrier lifetime in materials. The latter has been named resonance-coupled photoconductive decay (RCPCD) and has been extensively applied to silicon and non-silicon materials. He has set up a version of the RCPCD measurement apparatus at the Colorado School of Mines. Ahrenkiel also works in photovoltaic device design and modeling. He has specialized in laser scribing of photovoltaic devices. The laser-scribing work has focused on thin films such as amorphous silicon and transparent conducting oxides.