Richie received his Ph.D degree in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on the design and synthesis of novel biomaterials in the labs of Steven Zimmerman and Hyunjoon Kong. Following graduate school, he joined the lab of Xue Han at Boston University as a postdoc fellow where he worked on surgical methods for drug delivery to the brain as well as the development of nanotechnologies that interface with the nervous system. He then went to work for a startup company.