Prof John Richardson was an Adjunct Professor and Resident Fellow, Residential College 4, National University of Singapore from 2017-2018. He was previously a Visiting Professor at RC4 and held concurrent appointments as Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and as a Fellow, Temasek Defense Systems Institute. His contributions in the areas of research, teaching, public policy consulting and academic administration draw upon a diverse background that includes graduate work in political science, anthropology, economics and mathematics. He may be one of a relatively small number of scholar-practitioners to have held academic appointments in five academic disciplines: Political Science, Systems Engineering, Technology of Management, International Relations Theory and International Development. Before joining the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy as Visiting Professor in 2011, his principal academic appointments were at Case Western Reserve University and, for 30 years, at American University, where he was named Professor Emeritus in 2012. He also served as a Director of the Sri Lanka-based International Centre for Ethnic Studies for more than a decade.

He would describe the principal goal of his work, spanning more than 40 years, as making the results of rigorous public policy analysis widely accessible to policy makers and wider publics. This is reflected in the titles of six books from among those he authored or co-authored and a seventh, describing results of a project to which he was a major contributor: Partners in Development, Groping in the Dark: The First Decade of Global Modeling; Making it Happen: A Positive Guide to the Future; Ending Hunger: An Idea Whose time Has Come; Breakthrough: New Global Thinking; Paradise Poisoned: Learning About Conflict, Terrorism and Development From Sri Lanka's Civil Wars and Lessons from the Wars.

In 1982, he was named by an international committee of the Society for Computer Simulation as "One of the Twenty Most Effective Decision-Makers in the World." In 2012, he was named by the Balaton Group, an international network of scholars in fields related to systems and sustainability as its "Member of the Year." In 2013, he became only the third member of the System Dynamics to receive the Society's Lifetime Achievement Award. At American University he was nominated by the School of International Service as its "Scholar Teacher of the Year" on three occasions and received numerous other awards for academic program development and service to the university community.