Dr Richard Keith Wright is an Associate Professor in Sport, Leisure and Active Living, within the AUT School of Sport, Exercise and Health and a Co-Director of the AUT Centre for Active Ageing. Rich, as he prefers to be known, is also the Programme Leader of the Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma in Sport and Exercise. He describes himself as a sport-obsessed leisure sociologist and social gerontologist who primarily engages in co-designed/created participant action research and arts-based scholarship that seeks to engage and empower older adults through the sharing of meaningful and memorable stories.

Rich’s teaching, research and industry engagement activities showcase serious leisure and active ageing as a visible, valuable and viable means of inspiring social change and sustainable development. Over the past two decades, he has presented at numerous international conferences and accrued over 300 citations from publications located within a range of peer-review journals, edited books and industry reports. He was an Associate Editor for the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure between 2017-2025 and currently holds the same roles for the Journal of Sport and Tourism and the Frontiers in Sports and Active Living (Sport, Leisure, Tourism, and Events). He also sits on the Editorial Board of Annals of Leisure Research.

Rich was a board member of the Australia and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies (ANZALS) from 2017-2023 and joined the board of New Zealand Association of Gerontology in December 2025. Within the industry, Rich was Chair of the North Shore Table Tennis Association from 2016-2020 and Secretary of the Auckland Sunday Football Association from 2021-2023. In 2022, Rich was elected as the first Chair of the Sporting Memories Foundation Aotearoa New Zealand, a newly established charitable trust that helps people offer hope and happiness to older adults living with dementia, depression and loneliness.