Read's early work concerns understanding properties of rare-earth "heavy-fermion" compounds.[3] Along with Greg Moore he developed the theory of non-abelian braiding statistics in quantum Hall systems. He developed a theory of "composite fermions", which can be used to explain properties of free electron gas at high magnetic fields, in quantum hall liquids and half-filled Landau levels. Read was awarded the 2002 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize together with Jainendra Jain and Robert Willet "For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems"[3]