Dean Rickles is Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and a Director of the Sydney Centre for Time.

Rickles received his PhD from the University of Leeds, under the supervision of Steven French, with a thesis on conceptual issues in quantum gravity. He took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary split between health sciences and philosophy), on the application of complex systems theory to population health. He joined the department of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney in 2007, receiving a 5-year ARC Australian Research Fellowship in 2008 and a 4-year ARC Future Fellowship in 2014. He is director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, and is also co-leader on a Templeton Foundation-funded interdisciplinary project on the flow of time.

His primary research focus is the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly quantum gravity and spacetime physics. However, he also has strong interests in econophysics, population health, and musicology.