Rich Aronson grew up in Queens, New York City. As a child he fell in love with marine biology collecting seashells at Jones Beach on Long Island. He received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1979 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1985. He held Postdoctoral Fellowships in England, at the Smithsonian Institution and Rutgers University. Since 1994 Rich has been a Senior Marine Scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Alabama's facility for education and research in the marine sciences.

Rich has traveled extensively and he has lived in the Bahamas and Britain. He has been diving all over the world, from the Caribbean to the Seychelles, the North Sea and even Antarctica. He currently teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level field courses on coral reef ecology in the Caribbean. At the Dauphin Island Sea Lab he is involved in education at the K-12, undergraduate, graduate and adult levels. He works with a teacher at the nearby Fairhope K-1 Center on Penguin Pals, a program that allows kindergarten and first-grade students to communicate with scientists in Antarctica via the Internet. Rich's main research focus is the effects of disease and global climate change on coral reefs, but he also maintains an active research program on the evolution of marine animals in Antarctica. His work on reefs in Belize was featured in National Geographic Magazine in June 2000.