Dr. Richard B. Wells collection

Contents: About Dr. Richard B. Wells | About the Collection | Tech

About Dr. Richard B. Wells

Richard B. Wells was born in Maquoketa, Iowa on September 6th, 1953. He studied electrical engineering at Iowa State University, receiving his B.S. with distinction in May of 1975. He went on to work at Hewlett-Packard in California and earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in May of 1979. He moved to Boise, Idaho, and earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Idaho in May of 1985. Wells taught at the University of Idaho from 1981 until 2013. He retired in 2013 and passed away in February of 2024 in Boise, Idaho.

Wells’s teaching and research focused on electrical engineering, coding and information theory, computational neuroscience, cognitive computing, and philosophy, especially the work of Immanuel Kant. By the time of his retirement, Wells was a professor of both electrical and computer engineering and neuroscience, and an adjunct professor of both philosophy and materials science and engineering.

About the Collection

This digital collection presents a sampling of Dr. Richard B. Wells’s work from 1972 through 2018, including notes, notebooks, lab work, written manuscripts and monographs, and professional and personal correspondence. Dr. Wells’s research delved into a large number of topics, from electrical engineering to philosophy. Following Dr. Wells’s death in 2024, his sister Melody Witt donated his papers to the University of Idaho Special Collections and Archives. As part of the Summer 2025 Richard B. Wells Fellowship, Annie Sheneman processed the Dr. Richard B. Wells papers archival collection and created this digital collection.

This sampling of materials spans Dr. Wells’s entire academic and professional career, beginning with college laboratory notebooks and lecture notes from Wells’s time at Iowa State University, continuing into professional documents from his work with Hewlett-Packard, through Dr. Wells’s academic career at the University of Idaho, to the monographs he worked on in his retirement. As such, these materials offer insight not only into the many topics Dr. Wells studied throughout his life, but also into his decades-long career as an academic and a researcher and into the process of academic work itself.

Dr. Wells worked in a wide array of academic disciplines, including electrical engineering, computer science, materials science and engineering, communication technology, philosophy, metaphysics, neuroscience and cognition, and theories of education and politics. The materials in this collection likewise span many disciplines and topics, many of them interconnected throughout Wells’s research and notes. For example, his work on neuroscience often overlaps with his work on electrical engineering (work on cognitive computing and computational neuroscience), and also with his work on metaphysics and cognition (what he called “mental physics”). The items in this collection trace Dr. Wells’ thoughts, interests, and writing processes over time.

This collection contains Dr. Wells’s writing work at all stages of development, from boxes of index cards with key theoretical terms to “writing notebooks” of theories and notes taking shape, to handwritten drafts and eventually typed and printed monograph manuscripts. Thus, this digital collection offers more than just a window into Dr. Wells’s intellectual contributions; it shows the processes of an academic who did significant work without computer word processors. The handwritten pages, with their hand-drawn diagrams, different colors of ink, and carefully penned footnotes, reflect an academic work process that was deliberate and tactile. Even typewritten documents show this “analog” mindset, layered with handwritten edits and marginal thoughts that show Dr. Wells’s thought process. This collection captures Dr. Wells’s scholarship and the methodology of intellectual work before digital tools transformed academic writing and note-taking practices.

Sources

Richard B. Wells. University of Idaho profile. http://web.archive.org/web/20201106010558/http://www.mrc.uidaho.edu/~rwells/.

Richard B. Wells. Full Curriculum Vita. Neuralgraphs.com. https://www.neuralgraphs.com/wellslabs/full_CV.html. Archived: https://perma.cc/2W8J-JCK6.

Richard B. Wells. Neutralgraphs.com. https://www.neuralgraphs.com/wellslabs/index.html. Archived: https://perma.cc/95X9-DWBE.

Richard Wells Obituary. Cloverdale Funeral Home. https://www.cloverdalefuneralhome.com/obituaries/Richard-Wells?obId=42864806. Archived: https://perma.cc/PS66-QHWC.