Richard Fred Heck (born August 15, 1931) is an American chemist noted for the discovery and development of the Heck reaction, which uses the metal palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactions that couple aryl halides with alkenes. Heck was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 6, 2010, with the Japanese chemists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, for their work in palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions in organic synthesis.

Heck earned both his bachelor's degree (1952) and his doctor of philosophy degree (1954) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working under the supervision of Dr. Saul Winstein.
His remarkably productive research work at the Hercules Corp. led to his being hired by the University of Delaware's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1971.
By 2002, applications had grown to the extent that the Organic Reactions chapter published that year, limited to intramolecular Heck reactions, covered 377 pages.
In 2005, he was awarded the Wallace H. Carothers Award, which recognizes creative applications of chemistry that have had substantial commercial impact.
He was awarded the 2006 Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods.