Robert Michael Rich (born 1957) is an American astrophysicist. He obtained his B.A. at Pomona College in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1986 under thesis supervisor Jeremy R. Mould. He was a Carnegie Fellow at Carnegie/DTM until 1988 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he was the doctoral thesis adviser to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and is on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.